Amol Rajan Goes to the Ganges review — sceptic swept along by cosmic energies
TV hasn't always been a confessional medium but in our more touchy-feely age you cannot move for celebrity-led spiritual journeys, emotional discoveries and deep dives into traumatised minds.
I wouldn't quite put Amol Rajan Goes to the Ganges (BBC1) in that bracket. Indeed it would be hard to put this broadcasting jack-of-all-trades in any bracket, with his ear stud, classless estuary accent and the fact that his formative heroes were, he told us while playing drum'n'bass music in his car, the philosopher Bertrand Russell and the larrikin Australian leg spinner Shane Warne. Rajan's companion here was another childhood hero, or rather heroine — his mum. She seemed pleased, if mildly sceptical, that the Today and University Challenge presenter's latest job was to travel to the Hindu festival Kumbh Mela in India, principally to honour his late father, who died suddenly three years before, and to process his loss.
The charismatic mother is another feature of these sorts of shows (and here I cite Romesh Ranganathan's ma for reference) and Mrs Rajan did not disappoint. After she told her son that he was once a 'pleasantly plump' young lad, they discussed the sacred importance of all rivers in Hinduism, even London's cold grey Thames, where her husband's ashes were scattered. I loved their relationship.
A likeably emotional man, Rajan seems occasionally to speak before he thinks. At first he approached this serious subject in the manner of someone heading out for an impromptu chippy tea. He spoke of his 'psyched vibe' at the promise of a 'bit of healing' in India. However, as a two-showers-a-day man, he wasn't looking forward to the potential hygiene issues at an event where about 70 million people were crammed in a corner of the Ganges. Would he simply think, 'You're just a river, mate'?
Then the realisation dawned that he didn't want to let down the man he kept referring to as his 'dear dad'. You suspected that his jauntiness — the way in India he observed 'amazing … shit going on over there' — was probably partly due to nerves.
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Whether or not you think this kind of profoundly intimate soul-searching should be done away from the cameras, the best TV journeys tend to be made by proper journalists. Rajan's radio training allowed him to paint vivid pictures of the enormous gathering, including its smell ('pollution mixed with incense'). He was also impressively collected when tragedy struck en route to the pilgrimage site — a stampede that resulted in 90 casualties and 30 deaths — before an eye-opening chat with a 'wise lady' called Aunt Lakshmi from a nearby ashram about the circle of life and the many facets of God within Hinduism. Their discourse on their contrasting approaches to grief and death was multicultural programming in the truest, most captivating sense.
And while Rajan was not going to abandon his 'hard won' westernised scepticism, he did deliver a moving climax where he honoured the spirit of his dad in the form of the symbolic oatmeal offering in the great river. 'Bye, Dad,' he said, before marvelling at the 'cosmic energies flowing through me right now … in the Holy Ganga'. It was hard not to be swept along with him.★★★★☆
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