Walking with Kate Garraway
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Comedy Comedians Give Lectures
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Hello Mr GMB, please play a song to me in the morning jingle-jangle on breakfast TV. All right. Love, peace, and competitions via phone are all okay.
Kate Garraway was a bit of an eccentric hippy, even though no one realized it. Though she wasn’t wearing tie-dye or weaving flowers in her hair on Walking With . . . (BBC2), she was one of Nature’s Children.
Flinging her arms around a beech trunk in the Cotswold countryside, she sighed: ‘I’m a tree-hugger. I’m one of those that believe there are brilliant vibrations, that you can feel life coursing through it.’
In order to make her point, she laid down under a large lop-sided Ash tree and listened carefully for the birdsong. ‘The sound of nature is like a warm bath,’ she said.
Kate Garraway is the host of Good Morning Britain. She appears on the BBC Two show Walking with Kate Garraway. The series sees Garraway take a stroll through the Cotswolds countryside with her drone and describe the peace and joy she finds there.
Radio 4 has been featuring solo meditations while on country walks for many years. BBC2 first discovered this format several months back, and sent Chris Packham along a riverside walk as lockdown was lifted. Now, a series of celebrity rambles are planned.
We’ll be pottering in the Yorkshire Dales with Steph McGovern, exploring the Kentish coastline with Jim Moir (better known as Vic Reeves) and striding out across the North York Moors with Monica Galetti. Kate kept assuring us that her natural home was the great outdoors, but she wasn’t keen on sharing it with cattle. She said that a cow chased her as a child for swinging a stick.
Friesians looked at her suspiciously. Perhaps they didn’t like her selfie-camera on an extendable pole. Or perhaps they didn’t like to be spoken to like guests who were outstaying their welcome on Good Morning Britain: ‘Lovely to meet you all, keep chewing the cud.’
Kate Garraway, as no one knows, is quite a hippy. Though she wasn’t wearing tie-dye or weaving flowers in her hair on Walking With . . . (BBC2), she was one of Nature’s Children
Kate felt more comfortable with people she met, particularly a couple of potters who lived on her smallholding near Upton St. Leonards.
Sean spent hours working with clay that his wife Victoria had decorated with exquisite calligraphy. ‘The way it works,’ Sean said, ‘is Vici tells me what to do, and I do it.’ That won Kate’s approval. ‘They’ve carved out their own slice of happiness,’ she said, musing on the difficult 18 months since her husband Derek was crippled by Covid.
She drew strength from trees, but that was not the most important thing. Resting beside an oak that had been struck by lightning, she said: ‘They don’t give up, even when their roots have been shaken to the core.’
Harriet Kemsley was a comedian who took a less sanguine view of marriage to launch Comedians giving Lectures (Dave).
‘I didn’t take my husband’s name,’ she said, ‘because I am a strong, independent feminist. And, I didn’t think it would last.’
Sara Pascoe hosted the event. It required three acts of creativity to create lectures using title ideas from IBM Symposiums and IBM Conferences.
Comedy Presents Lectures on Dave is hosted by Sara Pascoe. Jo Brand was also included as a host. Three comedians were challenged to create real lectures.
Producers hoped performers would come up with new jokes that fit the bill. It was obvious that the majority of the material had been taken from abandoned routines. Jo Brand didn’t even bother to hide it, as she undermined her own lecture on why ‘older people are happier’.
‘I know it’s not true, you know it’s not true, but play along,’ she told her audience.
Jo’s best lines have always dripped with poison, and some of her jokes about the elderly were lethal: ‘I drove my dad to Dignitas. It was truly sad. . he managed to get out of the boot on the ferry.’
If she’s just going to tell some gags, regardless of the lecture theme, why bother with the format at all?.
Night light sword
Prof. Brian Cox waved his laser pointer at the Universe night sky (BBC2), as he pointed to distant star clusters. It looked like an Star Wars weapon thanks to special effects. I bet he’d secretly rather be a Jedi Knight than a TV presenter.