TV Review: Julia Bradbury's Irish Journey delves into diaspora identity - but it's turgid telly
TV presenter Julia Bradbury, on her Irish Journey for Channel 4.
The word journey gives me the willies.
It used be about going from A to B, but now it’s about growing as a person. And it’s very boring watching someone going through a journey of self-discovery on TV.
So I had low hopes for (Channel 4). And I wasn’t disappointed.
It had a good start, at the Rock of Cashel. I’ve only been there once on a school tour and the only thing people remember about school tours is getting sick on the bus. I should go back based on Julia’s journey, the 12th-century frescoes in Cormac’s Chapel look amazing.
But it was downhill after that. She popped up in my home town, Kinsale, but every travel show in the world has been to Kinsale and it’s hard find anything new. That’s probably why they had Julia go on a food journey around the town and West Cork.
Food journeys are the worst. They are never about what local people actually eat, because a British audience isn’t going to tune in to watch Irish people eating smash burgers and Spaghetti Bolognese.
So we have seafood and seaweed and delicious looking dainty chocolates, treat food that might appeal to a visitor. We’ve seen it all before.
In fairness, Maggie Robinson and her husband Ken from Basingstoke mightn’t have seen any of this before and Julia tucking into a lovely bit of seafood in Max’s restaurant in Kinsale could well be the trigger to their tourist trip across the Irish sea, tapping card readers all along the Wild Atlantic Way.
But as an Irish person living here, it’s turgid telly. It might have been okay if Julia was any craic, but she isn’t. This may or may not be because she was born in Dublin.
Julia is nice and polite and says all the right things about seaweed and dainty chocolates. She’s delighted with pottery and wood carving and finds inner peace while kayaking in West Cork.
Who wouldn’t? The real problem here is predictability. Ireland looks nice, Julia loves it. It made me long for Kirstie Allsopp from Location, Location, Location. Say what you will about Kirstie, but I reckon she’d have refused to eat the seaweed.
In the absence of any surprise or personality, this all feels like a video for Tourism Ireland. If it brings Maggie and Ken over from Basingstoke, great, but I think that could be the end of me watching UK travel shows about Ireland.
We only watch these things in the hope that a British presenter will downplay the famine and we can get juiced up on the self-righteous fury. No chance of this here, as Julia went to a famine memorial in Skibbereen and we got to hear horror stories about people crawling into town for food.
Julia’s journey was a travel show by the numbers. If she did it about some part of Scotland I’d probably watch it. I might even decide to go over and try some local seaweed. But I’m never going to do that in West Cork.
