The first part of Victoria Wood's documentary about tea, Victoria Wood's Nice Cup of Tea (BBC One), was saved from being quite as vacuous as most celebrity travelogues through a sprinkling of genuinely interesting facts and just enough lines to laugh at.
For travelogue it was: Wood was off to find out the origins of tea, first in China, and later in India, where it had been secretly growing for millennia, probably, before the British discovered the fact in the 19th century.
The funniest line was when, after a Chinese waitress had recited a little speech lasting around 30 seconds as she presented Wood with her lunch, Wood summarised it as "Minestrone's off". But actually, even if the programme wasn’t pitched at the most sophisticated level, Wood’s presence, frequently self-deprecating, always warm, was a pleasure throughout.
And the fact that hundreds of millions of Chinese tourists every year come to photograph three scrappy tea bushes that were supposedly the ‘mother’ trees of a much loved tree plantation, and that Indians in Calcutta have a festival to a God of machines during which all the tea machines are blessed in the factories offered a comforting reminder that it is not just the British who have their idiosyncracies.
