THE GANGES WITH SUE PERKINS, BBC1, 10.45pm
FOR many Indians, the Ganges “is a living goddess” with the power to wash away sins and cleanse the soul.
In this three-part series, Sue Perkins will follow the Ganges, from the Himalayas to the sea, trying to find out what this sacred river means to the cultures who treasure it.
She starts with telling us she has had a terrible year and hopes to find some kind of peace on this journey, but forget the idea that this series will be all soft and spiritual. Sue is quickly plagued by altitude sickness and the thin mountain air soon has her “retching over a hillock.” She also rages about plans to dump raw sewage in the Ganges. There is nothing pretty and precious about her. She is plain-speaking, blunt and honest; I like her. After the Himalayas, she enters the city of Rishikesh and is assailed by traffic, crowds, markets, beeping horns, and monkeys, and she finds the time to go shopping: “Do you have any big pants?”
MY WEEK AS A MUSLIM, C4, 9pm
“WHAT would it feel like to become the thing you most fear?”
Katie, a white Mancunian woman who feels Britain’s traditions are being eroded by immigration, and whose daughter is afraid of women in burqas, spends a week living with a local Muslim family. Previously she’d have been wary of sitting next to a Muslim as she’d “automatically assume they’re going to blow something up”, so will her opinions change?
She lives with Sima, a Muslim teacher who “feels very sad” that people might assume she’s a terrorist, and wants to show Katie what ordinary Muslim life is like. “We’re not aliens,” she says.
The experiment is deepened (some say cheapened) by Katie donning brown make-up and headscarf, meaning she will “enter the Muslim community in disguise” to see how they, and other white people, react to her.
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