Pilgrimage with Simon Reeve; The Joy of Logic – TV review

Having journeyed his way across both Tropics and the Equator, not to mention the Indian Ocean and Australia, Simon Reeve has now turned his gaze rather closer to home for his new series. In Pilgrimage with Simon Reeve (BBC2) he journeys along three well-trodden pilgrim routes in Europe and the Middle East because … Well, he's not really sure why. He's not a believer, he's not even that sure he has much of an interior landscape, but he's a good sport, a fun companion and he needs an adventure. So why not?

His first leg took him from Lindisfarne to Canterbury. It started quite promisingly with him walking across the mud flats to the Holy Island to talk about the benefits of being warmed by otters after a hard night's prayer waist deep in the North Sea. Thereafter, it rather tailed off. "I'm not meeting many pilgrims," he said, mournfully. This shouldn't have come as too much of a surprise to him as he was on a train at the time, travelling from Newcastle to Lincoln. "Some pilgrims did used to stop in Durham and York," he added. But he didn't.

And I could see why. Because even if he had slogged the miles on foot, he almost certainly wouldn't have come across any pilgrims. We Brits don't really do pilgrimages any more. The closest Reeve came to any form of mass pilgrimage on his travels was at Walsingham, though this looked more like a five-mile bank holiday walk than the full Monty. Things picked up a bit in London, when he headed off towards Canterbury with a more fun-looking crowd, but these turned out to be Chaucer fans rather than actual pilgrims and they all dumped him at New Cross. The only real pilgrim on offer was Lindsay, a caretaker who has travelled more than 5,000 miles with a 25kg cross on his shoulder. More of him, and the programme would have begun to sing.

As it was, Simon's pilgrimage was a bit of a muddle. It couldn't decide if it was a history of pilgrimage in Britain – I could have done without the awkward episode in the transport cafe where a food historian made him a medieval meal – or his own pilgrimage to come to an understanding of those who travel in faith. It didn't work as either. Reeve is at his best when he's sparking off interesting conversations with people he meets. In this first episode he didn't get to meet enough of them. Whether by accident or metaphor, most people seemed to be walking in the opposite direction. I felt I was doing the same.

My bet is that this series will improve the moment Reeve leaves Britain. A pilgrimage might be fun and a bit of an adventure, but these are not the qualities that give pilgrimage its fascination. Otherwise any long walk would count as one. A real pilgrimage is a physical expression of faith and this element was left largely unexplored. I suspect it's something done rather better by southern Europeans. If Reeve can stay away from historians and the clergy on his next leg to Santiago di Compostela, we could be in for a treat.

Given that most human beings don't always think logically, and that logic is the basis of all computer programming, I've never really understood why so many artificial intelligence experts have made it their goal to get a computer to act like a human. Surely you've failed the moment you have to program a computer to make an illogical process? If I've missed an important syllogism or paradox here, please don't let me know. I'm not that bothered and I doubt I would understand.

In any case, there are more than enough times when I'm happy to be illogical. Watching The Joy of Logic (BBC4) was one of them, as this was a programme, were logic to be applied, that should have been a turn-off. What made it work, though, was Professor David Cliff's utterly uncompromising attitude to comprehensibility. There was no pretence that this was a subject that could be understood by more than a handful of university dons. He didn't bother trying to make it accessible; rather, he just allowed the programme to wash over us all in a torrent of equations.

The thing about logic is that it seems to make an idiot of even the finest minds. Poor old Gottlob Frege thought he had it cracked before Bertrand Russell found a flaw in one of his sets. Or sub-sets. Then Russell wrote a 300-page proof of why 1 + 1 = 2, only for others to find out that it didn't. Even Cliff isn't immune. He invented the software program that has allowed traders to make a fortune on the stock market and gave it away for nothing. Still, at least he hasn't profited from designing the system that helped bring about the global financial crisis.