James May's Great Explorers, review: Horrible Histories with a Top Gear voiceover
James May's Great Explorers is a new series for Channel 5, beginning with an episode devoted to Christopher Columbus. No-one is pretending the show is terribly academic, but it's the most enjoyable history programme I've watched in ages. It's Horrible Histories with a Top Gear voiceover, a bit of science and some comical cookery demonstrations thrown in, funny but educational if you're coming to this with only the vaguest knowledge of Columbus (discovered North America, didn't he? Well, no). The show isn't aimed at a young audience, because young people don't watch Channel 5. Stick this on in schools, though – maybe with a break, because it's 90 minutes long and children now have very short attention spans – and marvel at how much information sinks in.
May presents in his usual, slightly shambolic style, and his key message here was that Columbus was clueless. 'An utterly inept sailor who had somehow crossed an ocean and made it to some mysterious islands that we now know as the Bahamas, Cuba and Hispaniola in the Americas. Try telling him that, though. He was certain he was on some islands just off Japan.' Or: 'His plan was, in scientific terms, b------s.' Any teachers showing this in a classroom should probably cough loudly over that last bit.
May messed around in a dinghy to show why triangular sails are effective, and demonstrated the theories of mathematician Ptolemy using a globe, a bicycle light and a plastic camel. The piece de resistance, though, was May making and sampling ship's biscuits. 'It's quite difficult to articulate how horrible that is,' he said, on first taste. 'It's almost wantonly miserable.' He declared the accompanying salted pork and pea stew to be 'delicious, but it might be delicious because I've been eating ship's biscuits. It's a bit like being beaten up and when it stops you think, 'This is nice,' but it isn't nice, it's just normal.'
The show touched briefly on slavery – a historian told May that Columbus was 'the largest single trader of enslaved indigenous people during this period'. May looked uncomfortable. 'Yes, very good point, yes,' he said, then got back to the easier business of making jokes.
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