Freeload into the sunset

There are some pretty cushy jobs in the media, if you know where to look. Restaurant critic isn't bad (although friend of the restaurant critic is better, because you don't have to write up the dinner afterwards), and the man who teases the nipples for the Page Three stunnas doesn't have much to complain about either.

But best of all is surely a stint as presenter of a TV travel show. Don't believe the likes of the peripatetic lobster (Judith Chalmers) when she tells interviewers: "It's no holiday, the itinerary is hell." In truth, it's one long vacation, and I am jealous, which is why I've recently blackmailed the heads of TV travel programmes into sending presenters to destinations redolent with innuendo.

Before long, you'll be seeing Carol Smillie writhing with embarrassment as she has to admit "I'm in Gobbler's Nob" or "Wank in Bavaria is well worth a visit," while Ruth England will go crimson as she takes a break in Pissy (France). As for Jonathan Ross, he doesn't know it yet, but we'll soon be hearing him "live from Twatt" in the Shetlands.

If only Frank and Nesta Bough were still presenting holiday programmes, I'd send them off to Pervy Shag (Omsk), where the dapper Frank could tell us "Nesta is having the kir royal, and I'll have the coke."

But alas, Frank was banished from the cushy world of travel journalism after his bit of trouble with the whores and the nose candy, and he even seems to have been airbrushed out of The Way We Travelled, BBC2's latest attempt to create a new series from archive clips.

Showing the old footage in its original, unedited form could have made for fascinating television, but a fatuous narration (voiced by the equally fatuous Nick Hancock) ensured that last night's instalment wandered through the Fifties and Sixties as aimlessly and undiscriminatingly as a junior reporter on the Sky Travel channel wandering through a golfing resort in the Algarve.

Indeed, when it began with the words "from Butlins to Bali, from Torremolinos to Timbuktu", I was reminded of the time I was sent to Arnstadt in Germany to review a dodgy restaurant, because on both occasions I immediately began to fear the wurst.

Despite the programme's title, what we saw was they way they travelled, with the licence fee being used to send a handful of presenters around the globe in luxury, while the rest of the post-war population waited for the era of cheap air travel. Richard Dimbleby was the first to board the gravy train (first-class, of course), taking his entire family to countries we'd been at war with just a decade or so before, on behalf of his Passport travel series.

"It was no holiday at all," recalled his brother, Jonathan (reciting the official BBC line about media freebies), "because you were at the mercy of the TV crew." To be fair, they did occasionally draw the short straw, once heading north from London during a wet period and ending up in the Lake District, only a few years before that area became immortalised as (Donald) Campbell's Cream of Coniston Soup.

After detours to acknowledge the contributions of Cliff Michelmore and the early Blue Peter presenters, most of the documentary was given over to the non-commissioned officer of British television, Alan Whicker.

The archive told a sorry tale of the Savile-Row-suited globetrotter, unconsciously chronicling his decline from an acerbic reporter into an uncritical worshipper of the rich and famous, who once crawled so far up the lower colon of the Sultan of Brunei that he could have performed a tonsillectomy from the inside.

"Alan Whicker was a great hero of mine," declared Holiday presenter Rowland Rivron.

I remembered the old adage about judging your enemies by their friends, because both men only ever seem to be at ease when they're with the upper set (although, ironically, Whicker's own upper set nowadays rattles out the Morse code for D-e-n-t-u-f-i-x).