The last human being alive

Weekend's TV reviewed: Ray Mears Goes Walkabout; Greek; The Inspector Lynley Mysteries

Ray Mears Goes Walkabout begins with a wonderfully ludicrous title sequence, in which honeyed shots of the presenter eating bits of bark and setting fire to twigs are decorated with printed imperatives, fading in and out on screen. "Journey," the words say, "Reveal... Encourage... Search... Inform... Learn... Understand... Engage... Enlighten." Dearie me, I thought, give us a break, Ray, just get on with it and bite the head off a witchetty grub. Still, it's not his fault, I imagine, but that of some bright spark on the production team, who presumably thought that quoting at length from the commissioning editor's latest pitching brief would be a good way of showing how zealously on-message the series is. Whoever came up with the idea, the result is ridiculous, conspicuously failing to grasp that Ray Mears is not loved by the public as a guru in khaki shorts but as a comedy act of delicious understatement. I suppose you could watch him in earnest he does nothing himself to prevent you but I would have serious doubts about your sense of humour if you never cracked a smile at all.

Maybe that's the secret behind the intergenerational, cross-demographic magic of Mears. Obviously, it helps that most people have an interest in survival techniques. We'd all like to believe that, come the Apocalypse, we'd be the ones knocking up bivouacs and skinning newts, rather than, as is more likely, incomprehendingly screaming “My BROADBAND has gone DOWN!” as feral zombie children gnaw our arms. Additionally, when first turning on Mears's shows, it momentarily appears that you are watching the former Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy wandering around in a wood, wearing an Indiana Jones hat and licking twigs. The resemblance is, I must say, quite uncanny.

Over my Mears Years, then, I have had many favourite Ray Moments. In many ways the episode in which - surviving in the middle of a Romanian forest - Ray rolls out some pastry, using a stick as a rolling-pin, to make a quiche, is the quintessential Ray Moment. A combination of absolutely unquestionable survival “chops”, and a great fondness for pies, as clearly indicated by his enviable status as the “cuddliest” survivalist on the block. Ray's Survival Quiche is Ray in a nutshell - a nutshell he had gathered, boiled, crushed, sieved, put in a muslin bag, left to rinse in a stream for 48 hours, and then fashioned into a small, fundamentally unappealing grey lump, to be burnt at the end of a stick.

But then, I could also argue for the inclusion of an anecdote by Ray's posh on-off survival chum, Gordon “The Prof” Hillman, as well. In the last series Hillman recalled the moment when, as a Cambridge undergraduate, he realised he had inadvertently eaten a fatally poisonous mushroom, and was already becoming paralysed. Unable to talk, he simply wrote the Latin name of the mushroom he had eaten on a Post-It note, stuck it to his own chest, and then passed out in a bar. That's the kind of people with whom Ray rolls. People who can even survive in Latin, in a bar.

Given all this then, who would not rejoice at the advent of Ray Mears Goes Walkabout? A series of hour-long shows wherein Ray, to use the current vernacular of young people, totally “pwnz” the Australian Outback (verb meaning to beat in an activity), using only a cup, a knife and a sheet of polythene. In the opening show, he attempts - well, does more than attempts - he TOTALLY SUCCEEDS, because he's RAY FREAKIN' MEARS - to recreate the epic journey of John McDouall Stuart, an early explorer who successfully crossed the continent from south to north, opening the centre up for the telegraph and trade. Where other explorers set out with the full paraphernalia of Victorian society (Burke and Wills even took a wooden dining table with them on their fatal expedition), Stuart travelled light and fast, letting the land draw out his route in a dot-to-dot of reliable waterholes. By 1862 he had become the first European to traverse the country and return alive. Admittedly, having a Land Rover made it a bit easier for Mears to follow in Stuart’s footsteps. Nonetheless, we got a powerful sense both of Stuart’s bravery and of just how unimaginably inhospitable the Australian interior proved to be.

First, we saw Mears driving along the Stuart Highway. The terrain might have been chosen to advertise the car. Mears parked and laid out his maps, which he had numbered. Numbering the maps, he told us, is important. It might save you a bit of confusion during the journey. He's full of this kind of stuff. It's partly the fact that no tip is too trivial that makes you warm to him. One of the first things he did, having got out of the car, was to put a net over his head, in case of flies. Of course, the outback is probably much more dangerous than it looks; that's because it looks great on TV, with the big sky and the reddish-yellow hue of the ground. For all I know, the place might be full of killer flies. But still. Mears looked a little eccentric in the net, but he knows what he's doing.

He went to a museum to look at Stuart's 19th-century equipment. It was a lot lighter than his own. But, as he pointed out, Stuart didn't have a Range Rover; he had to rely on horses. Mears, who is slightly chubby, looked with amazement at Stuart's belt. "I would barely get that round my thigh," he said. Mears then ventured into the desert. "It still has teeth," he told us. It made him very happy. That's the difference between him and Grylls: Grylls always looks as if he's desperate to get away from wherever he is. Mears wants to sit around, being contemplative. He showed us his solar firestarter, a shiny, curved disc with a pointy bit in the middle. You spear kangaroo dung on the pointy bit, and reflect the sun on to it. "The fibrous texture of kangaroo dung is particularly good for lighting fires," said Mears. “That'll smoulder away quite nicely now”. It was a lovely scene: simple, instructive, deeply comforting. The programme was worth watching for this moment alone.

We saw how Stuart had navigated the outback: by looking through a telescope for signs of greenery and birdlife in the distance. These indicate water and that's where he would head, to make camp. But why had Stuart wanted to explore the outback? What had been in it for him? He was lonely and friendless. So, in the desert, he was no worse off. In the past, exploring was about getting away from people. These days, as Mears demonstrates, it's about communicating with them. Watching Mears tell this story isn't the funny bit. I was engaged. I was enlightened. And his enthusiasm for the landscape and its surprises is rather endearing. But it's the superfluous bubble of survival information that makes me giggle, offered in a way that suggests he's addressing members of an imminently departing expedition, rather than a random group of couch potatoes who want a bit of proxy adventure.

As he travels, Mears shares with us the diverting fact that, while out on desert missions, the Australian Army discovered that a dehydrated man can buy more time on God's Earth by sucking the liquid out of a live lizard's bladder. In the hands of a flashier survivalist - obviously I'm thinking of Bear “SURVIVAL! FUCK YEH!” Grylls here - this would have been the cue for an almost unbearable level of survival brio. Grylls (on who Mears recently launched a surprisingly full-throated attack for faking some of his adventures) would probably have got a runner to assemble a whole trunk full of ready-to-urinate lizards, and seen how many he could suck dry, against the clock, while the readers of Nuts and Zoo sent in live text messages such as “Bare UR da shnizz haha LOL”. But Ray merely points to the lizard, tells us the fact, and then gets on with the more humdrum, but oddly soothing business of telling us how he has a calibrated tin mug, and how this is a very “personal” object to him.

At one point, Mears carefully took time out to give us a little tip about how to attach the shackle to your 4x4 when it gets bogged down in desert sand (“Here’s a little tip: When you’re winching and you tie your shackle on…”). He very nearly drew a diagram, so concerned was he that we would get the details right, and there was the same misplaced concern for our future safety when he showed us how to extract water from a desert eucalyptus with a large plastic bag. This, as always, was done in the apparently genuine, and certainly flattering, belief that one day we might actually use such knowledge. We also learn how to turn the salty water of the Outback’s mound springs into something drinkable. (Basically, very slowly.) In the sure and certain knowledge that information doesn't weigh anything at all, there's no harm in tucking it away just in case.

You look at Mears, in his jungle or desert, and you imagine him as a boy in a Surrey garden, dreaming of jungles and deserts. He brings an oddly suburban, almost Pooterish, extremely English attitude to his world-class survival chops. I loved the way he rigged up a sheet in the branches of a tree. Within a couple of minutes, it had the air of an awning. Then he lit a fire and baked a loaf of bread. When the Apocalypse comes, he'll be standing in a wood somewhere, drinking a cup of tea from his personal, calibrated mug, saying: “I'm the last human being alive. Gosh. Sorry about that.”

Greek, a new series on BBC3, also showed us an explorer venturing into hostile terrain with very little in the way of equipment and resources. It is a new US series about college fraternities and sororities. It's another example of how different the Americans are from us. We imagine students as slackers and drifters. Over there, they have complex formal social networks. In Greek, it's not enough just to get into a good college. You have to qualify for a fraternity or sorority, or you're a nobody. At first, I was sickened. The girls were all skinny and bitchy, hungry for status and power, and the guys were chiselled hunks. They looked like the people you see in those catalogues that come through the door. The hero, Rusty Cartwright, is one of a small number of people who looks normal. But against this background of buff bodies and nose-jobs, he looked like a bug-eyed freak. And Rusty had a problem: to get on in life, he must either become an off-the-peg hunk, or take on the whole system.

Rusty is a freshman at Cyprus-Rhodes University, arriving to find that he was rooming with a born-again Southern Christian whose first act was to lay out his bible and tack a Confederate flag to the dorm wall. This wasn't what Rusty was hoping for from college life and the engineering course's freshers' party was a considerable letdown, too, a giant stack of Red Bull cans and people playing robot wars. So Rusty decided to go in for Rush week, where prospective members eyed up various frat houses in the hope of being invited to join. Rusty's socially ambitious sister is a member of Zeta Beta and is going out with the head of Omega Chi, the most desirable fraternity, which gave the otherwise hopelessly geeky Rusty an outside chance of a place. But romantic complications meant that he also had an in at Kappa Tau, which clearly regards the film Animal House as holy scripture.

It is, I suppose, what US TV executives like to call dramedy, though there isn't a lot to justify the second half of that ugly hybrid, since it is distinctly timid about sinking the knife into America's gilded youth. The tubby Christian redneck got a pounding because, presumably, the execs calculated his demographic wouldn't be watching anyway. But the pretty characters are treated much more gently, and we're clearly expected to care about their emotional dilemmas. It has the essential dynamic of Scrubs an innocent at sea in a society that requires a meticulous knowledge of the done thing but none of Scrubs' Indian-burn relish for making its characters yelp.

Finally, the last ever series of The Inspector Lynley Mysteries (BBC1, Sun) began with the man still sunk in alcoholic grief after the death of his wife six months before. For most TV coppers, this would mean waking up in a tatty flat covered with as many empty pizza boxes and beer cans as the props department could rustle up. Being an earl, though, Lynley (Nathaniel Parker) was in his plush riverside apartment surrounded by a few decorously arranged bottles of superior whisky and a sadly neglected cafetière. He was roused from this rather civilised torpor by the discovery of the body of a young boy, who’d disappeared from a house party Lynley attended 12 years earlier. Since then too, the boy’s sister Julia (Georgina Rylance) had become estranged from her parents and was living in Rome – which meant Lynley’s first job was to persuade her to return home for the funeral. This he duly achieved by talking to her in front of a kaleidoscope of Rome’s most famous buildings.

For her part, Julia proved, if anything, even posher than him, with her Celia Johnson accent and languid aphorisms. (“‘What if’ are the deadliest words in the English language.”) Luckily for Lynley, she was also a goer – and back in London they shared a night of passion during which a photograph of his late wife fell symbolically to the floor. The next morning Julia’s lifeless body was found on the street five floors below his balcony. Lynley was then arrested for her murder by the weirdly vindictive Michelle Tate (Geraldine Somerville), whose questioning included the sensitive enquiry, “Your wife was shot dead right in front of you, wasn’t she?”

All of which soon led to the familiar tale of a policeman operating outside the rules, as Lynley set out to find the Real Killer: a process to which the programme took a somewhat unhurried approach, carefully crossing out the list of suspects one by one. In traditional whodunit style, the list also turned out to be a close-knit affair with the same people doubling as suspects, policemen, family lawyers and victims. The result was a perfectly serviceable way of passing the time. Even so, I can’t imagine too many viewers being sunk in alcoholic grief themselves when Inspector Lynley finally heads off into the television sunset (or UKTV as it’s also known).