When an 'idiot' turns his gaze back home

It has been a while since I traveled on the Chinese mainland, so in order to refresh my memory of some of the sights there I decided to go back to one of the most authoritative sources on world travel - the global hit TV series An Idiot Abroad.

Watching again the show's debut episode on China, it is fair to say that the presenter Karl Pilkington, the idiot of the title, does not entirely paint a rosy picture. But then this can be said of pretty much everywhere on the planet that he visits. As British as cut-price supermarket sausages or grimy station platforms, Pilkington is a comic misanthrope, a bald and glum fish out of water in the tradition of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels or Voltaire's Candide, whose one real desire is only ever to go back home.

In the Swiftian tradition, the China show features Pilkington visiting a real-life Lilliput - Kunming's "Dwarf Village" - populated entirely by little people in tiny homes. And at stops along his Great Wall journey, there are treats such as fried locusts, scorpions and cockroaches on sticks from a street market, and a scorching fire massage during which he thinks he's actually being immolated. I must admit, I never experienced anything like this in Shanghai - or even in Harbin!