Bishop on a bike sees life Down Under

TV Watch with Dave O’Connell

Let’s start at the beginning – I think John Bishop is a very funny man. And because you either do or you don’t, your view of his new television series is bound to be coloured accordingly.

So if you don’t like him, you won’t like John Bishop’s Australia on BBC1 – and if you think he’s one of the funniest men on the circuit, even the fact that an observational series of quirky Oz has now been a small screen cliché won’t deter you in the slightest.

It seems like only yesterday that Billy Connolly was doing the same thing – traipsing through the Outback, meeting funny little men with long beards and marvelling at the size of their crocodiles – but Bishop has come up with a small hook for his version.

Twenty two years ago when he was still an unknown Scouser, he did a fair bit of Australia on his bicycle, from Sydney to Cairns – so now he’s revisiting it with what appears to be no change of clothes, and a full camera crew.

The problem may well be that, for the purposes of television, Australia puts out the same dingbats every time – so you have the Crocodile Dundee types living in a swamp, the heavy drinkers living in a dead-end gold town and various other eccentrics that every television crew that’s been there encounters on their way.

He tries his hand at surfing and climbing off cliffs and witnesses, as you do, a vet sticking a catheter inside a koala’s diseased penis.

The saving grace is Bishop’s sense of humour – the downside here is that he’s starting to take himself a little bit too seriously.

He met a guy who was involved in crocodile conservation, for example, who funded this operation by killing the little ones for luxury handbags.

Admittedly that’s a hard square to circle, but it’s not the Fourth Secret of Fatima either; without being unkind to crocs, you break a few eggs to make a bigger omelette.

Then he meets the descendant of a Mayo man who farms four million acres – that’s the size of a small country – which he does from the comfort of his helicopter.

The poor man died since the filming of this series, but Bishop’s problem here was that he’s a vegetarian and doesn’t like to think of cows as meat.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Sentinel.