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It also causes to be published a weekly magazine called the Radio Times, in which there is a critical guide to all those films, and quite often the writer of the critical summary makes it pretty clear that a lot of the films broadcast by the BBC are rubbish and to be avoided at all costs.
Something similar has happened this week with Bill Bryson’s latest book, Down Under. Bill Bryson first came to the notice of many people with Kerry Shale’s excellent reading of his British travels on Radio 4, so it must have seemed logical for Radio 4 to have snapped up the broadcasting rights to the new book about Australia and make it their Book of the Week.This week we have duly been offered daily extracts from Bill Bryson’s account of his visits to Australia, interspersed oddly with snatches of what sounds like the middle section of the bossa nova “Desafinado”, which I had always thought was Brazilian, rather than Australian. (Another example of the BBC facing both ways – first trusting to the effectiveness of the solo spoken voice, and then chickening out and stuffing some music in… )Well, it may have been the Radio 4 Book of the Week, but we have also heard Bryson’s book cruelly torn to pieces on at least two Radio 4 programmes.

Last Saturday I caught the tail-end of a discussion of it on Tom Sutcliffe’s Saturday Review, the gist of which was that Bryson had gone to Australia with guidebook in hand and had done at most a sort of obsequious extrapolation from it.Things were rather more acid on Front Row on Wednesday, when Mark Lawson and Germaine Greer joined forces to dismiss Bryson’s book as a disastrous bundle of clichés masking a lack of curiosity about the place. Germaine Greer went further and said he had missed the whole point of Aboriginal culture, if not the whole point of Australia, and that the enterprise “smelt of the lamp”, which is a polite way of saying that Bryson had got all his stuff from his reading and not from direct experience. She was especially scornful of Bryson’s “discovery” that the seas round Australia are filled with the most dangerous creatures in the world. “My sister and I spent half our youth swimming in those waters,” she said. “Do you see any scars on me?”It was Mark Lawson who put his finger on the matter.

What made Bryson’s books about Britain and America so good, he said, was that he knew the places; his humour was based on affectionate knowledge and inside-track information. But Bryson had never lived in Australia and presumably had chosen to write about the place only because he had run out of familiar material, and had then found himself falling back on reference works…Bryson isn’t the first writer to suffer in such a way. I remember reading Eric Newby’s book about crossing Russia on the Trans-Siberian Express and wondering why he was introducing so much second-hand material about the places he was passing by (but not seeing), and so little material about the people he met and the places he could see.It soon dawned on me that he was fatally handicapped by not being able to get off the train – or at least by getting no further than the station platform – and therefore that his personal contact with Russia was limited to the interior of the train. You have to be a very good travel writer if you are going to limit yourself to the inside of a train. Alternatively, you are going to have be a very honest and brave travel writer to go to your publisher and say: “Look, I really don’t think after all that there’s a book in the Trans-Siberian Express,” or, in Bryson’s case, “Look, I don’t think I can be amusing about Australia in the same way I was about the USA and UK… Let’s forget the whole thing.”It is only quite recently that people have begun signing contracts to write travel books before they have actually done the travelling.

When the history of the 20th century comes to be written, I think there should be a chapter on the arrival, rise and proliferation of the travel book that didn’t need to be written Any nominations?
More from Miles Kington. As sheer audacity replaced sheer speed in the Tour de France so Laurent Jalabert surrendered the race lead to a cheeky Italian, Alberto Elli. The Frenchman’s yellow jersey pride was tinged pink after a topsy-turvy day on the road to Tours, when he finished seven minutes and 49 seconds after Elli and his 11 co-leaders. As sheer audacity replaced sheer speed in the Tour de France so Laurent Jalabert surrendered the race lead to a cheeky Italian, Alberto Elli.

The Frenchman’s yellow jersey pride was tinged pink after a topsy-turvy day on the road to Tours, when he finished seven minutes and 49 seconds after Elli and his 11 co-leaders.
With Jalabert were his main threats such as last year’s winner, Lance Armstrong, and Jan Ullrich, and of the three only the German was smiling. Elli is his team-mate, and a gifted lieutenant, but was not considered yellow jersey material, until Frenchman Jacky Durand launched one of his speculative solos. There were accusations of “ungentlemanly conduct” because the move came as Jalabert was answering a call of nature.Durand was joined by Elli and 10 others, and 186 kilometres further down the road, the 36-year-old Italian found himself on the podium with an overall lead of 12 seconds over an equally unknown Frenchman, Fabrice Gougot. Jalabert lags 5min 40sec behind Elli, who is only the seventh Italian in 25 years to wear the famous colours.”It is a reward for my 14 years as a professional,” he said “The jersey is very important, but it is not a victory.