next week: mild rimming with joan bakewell

I blame my Facebook friends again: when Steve mentioned that he'd come across (so to speak) a programme called Wild Swimming With Alice Roberts on BBC4 I had a struggle with my conscience of approximately 30 seconds duration before popping off to iPlayer to have a look.

What I can tell you, having done that, is that while it purports to be a celebration of the late Roger Deakin's book Waterlog, which describes a trip round Britain communing with nature in some slightly mystical way by swimming in various murky pools and rivers in the usual variable British weather, it is in fact an hour-long thinking man's crumpet wank fantasy starring the lovely Dr. Alice donning various wetsuits and skimpier swimming costumes and plunging into some of the weed-entangled waterholes that her predecessor visited. Those who can't hold out for the full hour might like to skip to around 23:30 where Alice takes a series of cold showers to acclimatise, and thence to around 5 minutes from the end where Alice finds a secluded tarn in the Lake District for a coyly photographed skinny dip, complete with much invigorated panting afterwards.

I'm not sure this Metro article's references to "stroking out in rivers" and "following in the breast-stroked ripples" are a slyly mocking reference to the BBC's move into pseudo-intellectual porn, or just some unintentional fnarr fnarr moments. Speaking of which, having first misread the title of the series Extreme Fishing with Robson Green by mentally swapping the "h" for a "t" I was never able to bring myself to actually watch it, just in case. Needless to say I'm not the only person to have made this mistake.