Our Guy in Vietnam, review: Martin is wasted on this feather-light tourist stuff
There is no one else like Guy Martin on British television. And there is no one else who can do what he does. So, to be blunt, why have Channel 4 sent him to undertake a job that Sue Perkins could do?
Our Guy in Vietnam (Channel 4), a two-part series to mark 50 years since the end of the Vietnam War, is not the usual Guy Martin gig – a daredevil challenge or an engineering geek's adventure – it is a bog-standard travelogue. 'We're in full tourist mode here,' says Martin. Yep. 'We don't normally do tourist things.' You do now, Guy.
'Yeah, Vietnam,' says Martin at the top of the programme, as if the audience had just shouted 'Vietnam?' at seeing the programme title. He's here, he says, because he's keen to get to the bottom of this 'Communism job' and we are treated to some GCSE-level potted history about Ho Chi Minh, the French occupation and central planning. The programme leans gently into Martin's strengths – vehicles, engineering, war history – and, as you witness him trying to pull a wheelie on a motorbike and sidecar, create some homemade napalm, zip down the Ho Chi Minh trail on a dirt bike, and detonate an unexploded cluster bomb, it feels like you are watching someone on a stag-do itinerary put together by a blokey amateur-history enthusiast. Even his patter is war-buffs-down-the-pub: 'It's not a point of debate. Vietnam won the war. Simple.'
Yet there was nothing here that Sue Perkins wouldn't do – tai chi down the park, hawking at a floating market, riding an overladen moped – and even the segments that should hold some weight, such as speaking to a man who was born with deformities because of Agent Orange, are gossamer-thin and over in the blink of an eye.
Some moments are just plain daft. 'Bus travel is quite a common form of travel in Vietnam,' says Martin. The voice-over teems with inane generalisations about the country ('The Vietnamese admire wealth') and some moments plumb depths of meaninglessness that even Inside the Factory and Gregg Wallace would fear. An electronic-vehicle factory site is, we're told, 'twice the size of Monaco'. We're not told how big Monaco is (about half the size of Central Park, since you ask).
It is arguably Martin's first misstep since he roared onto our screens in a cloud of exhaust fumes many years ago, and if the programme has merit, it's simply in spending time with him. There is something undeniably charming about watching a mechanic from Grimsby pottering about Hanoi, calling everyone 'duck' or 'big man', but Martin is wasted on this feather-light tourist stuff.
Occasionally, we get a glimpse of his unique appeal, such as when he notices that the thousands of lights in a gaudy temple are 'filament not LED' and frets about the cost, or when he visits Hanoi's famous Train Street and brings a tape measure so he can find out the track gauge. Martin has an idiosyncratic view of the world; Our Guy in Vietnam had everyone else's.
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