Peruvian flies love Yorkshire puddings

EastEnders, BBC 1

Every Picture Tells a Story, Five

Why did they do it? Living in Bradford could not in itself be sufficient reason for dumping a life of average comfort and heading hot-foot to darkest Peru. But brother and sister, Peter and Pam, the stars of Going to Extremes, embarked on precisely this madcap challenge - to live with an Indian tribe in dense Peruvian jungle - as you do when life gets flat.

"Imagine me going around in a loincloth," squealed Pam to her hairdresser prior to the trip. All of Bradford had picked up on the news, and was agog.

Hitting Peru without delay they took to the jungle, but would the jungle take to them? The menu it offered - squirming grubs, crunchy horned-beetle and an endless supply of bananas - was not to their taste.

They looked in vain for a Harry Ramsden’s where the grubs would at least be served with mushy peas. The local insects, however, had no such squeamish doubts when it came to feasting on foreign meat. They made a banquet of leg of Yorkshire. The tribe seemed amused.

The film concentrated exclusively on Peter and Pam’s tribulations, and on their increasingly heated chats which hinted at pasts that were on the demented side of troubled. Viewers craving an impression of tribal culture, or village ritual and ceremony were scuppered. The glimpses given - the taking of hallucinogenic drugs, or hunting birds with bows and arrows - were there to illustrate Pam and Peter’s increasing distaste for and disaffection with tribal life.

Their relationship blossomed, given these worsening daily doses of alien mores. And so, in extremis, they packed it all in, and headed home for lashings of roast with Bisto gravy, not to mention quadruple helpings of EastEnders served up weekly.

Perhaps they reached Tykeland in time to discover Den Watts had also achieved ‘extremis’ (about time too).

There he was, in Pauline and Dot’s dank launderette at dead of night, interrupting a bunch of tooled-up burglars: "I’m in the mood to crack a few ‘eads tonight," he told them. "Bring it on." They departed like lambs - but only because it was in the script. If this had been real they’d have slowly amputated the sneer from his scraggy face and stuck it upside down on his rectum. After that, things just got worse.

Dot Cotton popped up from her tiny hideaway in the tearoom and shouted: "Den Watts, you’re in extremis!"

(that’s how I found out). She was in the mood to crack a few jokes, but Den got there first. Hunting in Dot’s cupboard to fetch the sherry (naughty Pauline!) he said: "It’s not exactly Narnia in there, is it?", showing Dot his hidden literary side in what turned out to be a memorably literary episode.

It was one of those nights when *EastEnders comes over all arty. Dot and Den hogged the screen and the script - the bastard offspring of Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter. "How are you?" asked Dot. "Alright," said Den. "Yeah, but alright ain’t quite enough." Dot’s philosophical side was bristling. "You’re not just in a mess. D’you know what you’re in?" We knew for sure, and so did His Dirtiness. He was in full-blown, end-of-his-tether, rampant EXTREMIS. "End of your rope Den Watts," Dot translated. The script was clunky, the acting forced, attempting to rise to this bogus occasion. Then Dot’s bloke turned up, took her home and said: "Cuppa tea love?" and made it sound like he’d said "I love you."

Waldemar Januszczak was in love in Every Picture Tells a Story, a series that sets about explaining what lies behind an array of Januszczak’s favourite paintings. This week it was Manet’s erotic masterpiece (composition stolen from Raphael - sorry, ‘inspired by’), Le Djeuner Sur L’herbe, in which a threesome are having a picnic, two men in suits and a woman, naked. Januszczak’s habit of showing us everything but the picture was thankfully broken, added to which he had brushed his hair. This was a measure of the extent to which he was smitten by the woman in the painting.

Her name was Victorine, and she and Edouard Manet had had "sexual chemistry" Januszczak told us - a mere preamble to even more serious allegations concerning the conduct of Manet’s father, a senior judge who, according to Januszczak, had cuckolded his son. This unsubstantiated slander was followed by Januszczak’s declaration that Manet’s painting had changed art history "single-handed; without it there wouldn’t have been Impressionism, and without Impressionism there wouldn’t have been modern art." Amid this bluster the least incredible of these claims was that pictures have hands.