Travels with the Brit Bashing Corporation

NO OFFENCE to Rob Rinder and Rylan Clark but why on earth are we paying for their holidays? And why send them to Delhi? The biggest surprise in Rob & Rylan's Passage To India was that they didn't bump into another UK film crew making an equally vacuous, cliché-ridden travel documentary.

- with GARRY BUSHELL

There have been so many, how could this BBC Two series be any different? Simple. Unable to match the insight of Alan Whicker, the wit of Clive James or the calm curiosity of Michael Palin, the producers decided to make it all about their leading men, establishing their highbrow agenda in the opening teasers with Rylan squawking “I think I've got diarrhoea”.

Then came footage of the intrepid adventurers stuck in a traditional Delhi traffic jam with Clark squirming and squealing like his boxers were electrified.

Later he recreated Princess Diana's Taj Mahal pose on a bench in front of Humayun's Tomb, enjoyed all-day birthday delights and curried favour with gay Indians.

There was also, inevitably, some bog-standard BBC Britain-bashing.

Barrister turned Masked Singer alumni Rinder got in a hand-wringing tizzy about the British Empire. “For 200 years we ruled the country for our benefit,” he said, shuddering at our “problematic past”.

And Rob was aghast when Shalini (the super-rich star of Netflix's Fabulous Lives vs Bollywood Wives) had pictures of George V and Mary displayed at home. “Can you see why I'm a bit surprised?” he gasped. She could not.

“Nobody else has ever questioned it except the British,” she said, ie the self-loathing BBC and the self-righteous apparatchiks of the culture-war Left.