Greatest Cities of the World, ITV1

You always know where you are with Griff. You may be up a mountain or on a river or visiting any of the various topographical options the various TV companies deem it essential to send him. You may be doing up his house with him in Wales, where he freely admits he doesn’t really come from, or nosing round London, Paris or New York, as he did in the last series of Greatest Cities of the World. You may, as with the new series, be in Rome. But in the end, you never leave the Land of Griff.

In the Land of Griff, all is bafflement, muddlement and of course chortlement. The lingua franca understood across all of Griffland is the unhurried shake of the head, the unworried frown. With Griff in Griffland, everywhere has a tendency to look like everywhere else: it plays its tricks on you, makes you behave ever so slightly like a bit of plonker, brings out the subtle aromas of your essential naffness. Even in the Eternal City, surrounded as he competently explained by layer upon layer of ancient, Christian and contemporary history, you are eternally in the Land of Griff.

The conceit of Griff’s trip in Rome was as follows: to present a day in the life of the city. You could tell it was just a day because Griff wore the same burgundy polo shirt all the way through, from dawn as he entered the city on a farmer's fruit-and-veg three-wheeler through to his two-in-the-morning scoot round town on a Vespa. Either that or the shoot took the regulation fortnight and they invested in a job lot of burgundy polos. There's so little money swilling around ITV these days that you wouldn't put it past them to make Griff work a 24-hour shift.

He certainly got around a lot: down into an underground aqueduct, into a nunnery, a butcher’s, a sculpture workshop; into the heart of Rome's vehicular chaos with one of those white-gloved maestri of the traffic-controlling podium. He even visited Rome’s only female shoeshine outlet, whose popularity went uninvestigated until the camera caught a customer’s-eye-view of the patroness's plunging low-cut top.

Griff is the current occupant of a job once held by Alan Whicker, Clive James and Michael Palin. It’s a bit like actors passing on the role of the Doctor. The task? To explain Johnny Foreigner and his wily ways to Little England. James’s postcards in the 1980s were no doubt just as pre-nupped by squads of researchers, but there was a much stronger sense that others personalised their own despatches by actually, you know, writing them. Griff is nothing like as vain as Clive James, is much less assertive about putting his tone of voice at the epicentre of the narrative. Or maybe it’s just that his worldview is less charismatic, more pliant. Nice bloke and everything - lovely chap - but the product is ever so slightly vanilla.

He is, in short, perfect for contemporary television. Frightening the horses is not his area. The one moment he bared his teeth was on one of Rome’s myriad archaeological digs. “It’s not,” he advised from under his pith helmet, “a couple of old bricks and Tony Robinson has an orgasm.” You wish he’d been as mischievous again when tasting some lightly fried veal offal. He ruminated carefully. “Very delicious,” Griff told the chef. His face said otherwise.

This being ITV1, the tour around Rome featured no Sistine Chapel, no Trajan’s Column, no Caravaggio. I was rather hoping for a midnight glance round the suburb where mini-skirted Brazilian shemales ply their nefarious trade. But no. Griff secured an interview with the city mayor from which the programme barely quoted. He helped load a film in an outdoor cinema which he didn’t stay to watch. From the Trevi fountain to Fascist architecture, from la passeggiata to baroque, it was all rather rushed.

And badly pronounced. Over at the BBC they have a pronunciation unit to advise their presenters how to say Gianluca, Giovanni and Pio, not to mention grazie (clue: it doesn’t rhyme with Nazi). Curiously for a film about the marriage of the city's pagan past and Catholic present, the soundtrack was freighted with music by noted Lutheran JS Bach. Of course in the Land of Griff, you can always just turn the sound down. The photography throughout was utterly ravishing.

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