Simon Reeves swims with endangered sharks, while Louis Theroux has a close encounter with people suffering from dementia
Indian Ocean (BBC2) | iPlayer
Louis Theroux: Extreme Love (BBC2) | iPlayer
The Plot to Bring Down Britain's Planes (C4) | 4OD
A spirit of restlessness – or, less charitably, randomness – followed Simon Reeve in the first part of his trip round the Indian Ocean, BBC2's new Sunday-evening date with foreign travel and adventure. The views were spectacular, of course. It was hard to keep one's full empathy on the plight of, say, abalones – an endangered seafood highly prized by wealthy gourmet diners in China – with such eye-catching beaches to look at. Even the abalone poachers – tiny figures seen entering the water from a distance that seemed calculated to mock the telescopic powers of Reeve's camera crew – might easily have been a family from Milton Keynes enjoying a few days' snorkelling. Also (and I admit this has never troubled me before) I still have no idea what an abalone looks like. I did learn, though, that they are central to a criminal multimillion-dollar business tied to the trade in tik, a pernicious addictive methamphetamine blighting the poor communities of Cape Town.
One of the highlights of the programme saw the cheerful, tousled Reeve – his presenting style conjures up a boyhood spent in the malign grip of Blue Peter – infiltrating a local drug-dealer's den using the innocent method of sticking his head round the door. Not surprisingly, his first question – "Can I come in?" – was followed by: "Is that a real gun?" The hoodlums seemed friendly enough as they sat around smoking heroin, but as often happens in such mood-altering circumstances a darker atmosphere of "jostling" ensued in which Reeves was lucky to escape with his rucksack.
Anyone else would surely have called a policeman, but Reeve felt it was time to head up the coast to visit a flock of penguins endangered by overfishing, environmental mayhem and no doubt an appetite for penguin beaks among wealthy gourmet diners in China. Who even knew Africa had penguins?
There was a taskforce of slow-moving volunteers on hand to explain things and stick tubes down gullets, but I sensed that Reeve was eager to find something with bigger teeth and sure enough he found a woman called Gail who took him diving with endangered sharks. Would he get eaten in the first episode? No, but the experience of being ignored by these haughty, cold-eyed lords of the food chain as he hovered nearby in a frogman's outfit was "exhilarating". He was pleased to be back on dry land, though. "Less of the terror and more of the firma!" he quipped (cue Gail of laughter). But it was too late for flippancy now that he had seen how kind-hearted sharks could be, or at least how indifferent.
By the time he saw his next one – dragged out of the sea and dismembered by jubilant fishermen, its fins destined for the soup bowls of wealthy gourmet diners in China – he couldn't bring himself to join in the celebrations. "Wow…" he said politely, looking like a man trying not to approve of lap dancing while the camera was on him.
I could just leave Indian Ocean there, but no pointless 6,000-mile journey from Africa to Australia would be complete without a lull in the excitement occasioned by a brief examination of the Durban container shipping business. Oh yes, container ships, shipping containers, what shipping containers contain – you name it and it contained ships. Container ship enthusiasts who tuned in desperate to know how many millions of tonnes Durban's container ships haul back and forth over the course of a year must have punched the air. I could barely contain myself.
It's been a long time since Louis Theroux first delighted us with his faux-naive mode of getting celebrities to hang themselves, so to speak. Who can forget those classic encounters with Jimmy Savile, Paul Daniels and Chris Eubank? Theroux has quietly carried his shtick, too, among America's most deluded and dangerous: religious fundamentalists, porn stars, white supremacists, or those simply defending their historic freedoms to keep Siberian tigers in the back garden.
But seeing him the other week in the first episode of Louis Theroux: Extreme Love, also filmed in the US, I did wonder if he was quite the perfect man for the job. Which is to say, if I were a chronically fatigued parent struggling to raise two shrieking autistic children, Theroux would be the last person I'd want in the house with his dumb questions. This time, he was in Phoenix, Arizona, where he had been let loose among care-home residents suffering from dementia. He was still coming up with gems such as: "Do you forget things?" in the projected voice of a 1970s English tourist in Torremolinos, and he had that unfortunate habit of talking about people as if they're not there that makes the caring professions reach for their guns.
And yet watching him loitering awkwardly among what he called "the increasingly forgetful", I was struck by how easily he blended in. There was no disarming the already disarmed, but they warmed to him as they flitted arbitrarily between this world and a dreamlike other one we couldn't see. By trial and error, he brought out some telling moments. Here was Gary, an upright former dentist and the home's wandering lothario and wit. He seemed bright and lucid and had two frail women vying for his smiling attention.
"Are you married, Gary?" asked Theroux.
"No sir," answered Gary ruefully. "No one would have me. I had a sign out in the yard for a long time. It got to be embarrassing."
How we laughed. Half a minute later, we met his wife of 26 years. To Gary, she was the woman who ran his office.
There was heartbreak wherever you looked but also, as advertised, love of the steeliest sort. Theroux could be clumsy, but his familiar stoical patience and probing established an intimacy with these strangers that was as touching as it was fleeting, as if his years of coaxing the worst out of people had unexpectedly found a higher purpose.
I imagined a routine docudrama from The Plot to Bring Down Britain's Planes – a reconstruction of the police operation in 2006 that resulted in air travellers abruptly being advised not to pack shampoo – but it was a story that kept you on the edge of your seat. Real people told it – former home secretary John Reid, MI5, US intelligence chiefs ("My hair literally stood up on end," said one). But the rest was like a pacy thriller: an ops room flickering with monitors, agents following conspirators into supermarkets and internet cafes while others planted bugs and cameras in their flat. Here were the bad guys drilling holes in the bottom of Sprite bottles and syringing in volatile liquids and talking about suicide videos. The Brits decided to wait, but could we trust the Yanks? Reid was at a football match when it all kicked off. "Prepare to go mobile!" barked an unseen voice. You could have been watching Spooks if it weren't for the lack of explosions, though you couldn't complain about that.