Dom Joly, a journalist and travel writer best-known for shouting into a giant mobile phone and crawling across a zebra crossing dressed as a snail (as part of hidden camera show Trigger Happy TV), is also a closet "Tintinophile". This, we learned during Dom Joly & The Black Island, is a term used to describe fans of Belgian illustrator Hergé's seminal creation: Tintin, a quiffed teenage reporter whose globetrotting exploits Joly claims were responsible for his love of travel. This one-off documentary, prematurely commissioned in light of the fact a Steven Spielberg/Peter Jackson Tintin movie is a few years off yet, could have been a wonderfully informative and amusing piece of work... but, it really wasn't. Joly's boyish enthusiasm came across as a little insincere, or at the very least embellished because this is the only TV project he's got off the ground since the flop of World Shut Your Mouth in 2005.
The premise was decent enough as a trivial piece of whimsy: Joly wanted to retrace the step of Tintin's seventh adventure in "The Black Island", starting in the character's birthplace of Belgium for some back-story on his creation, before travelling up through England into the Scottish highlands. There's certainly a great documentary to be made on Hergé and his intrepid comic-book hero, but this wasn't it. Joly's jokey persona filtered through him dressing up as Tintin (ginger hair, sky blue top, long socks) and attempting to steal a dog that resembled canine companion "Snowy", which felt like a leftover Trigger Happy TV stunt that went wrong, and wasn't funny in the first place.
Comedy pretty much extinguished with, Joly's "adventure" involved crossing the English Channel on a ferry from Ostend to Dover, catching a train at Bishop's Stortford station (which was allegedly the inspiration for a setting in "The Black Island", but which now looks nothing like its drawing), before arriving in Scotland to locate the cover's black island castle, which again didn't really look much like the drawing.
A few nuggets of information was gleamed: Hergé based all of his drawings on photos sent to him of faraway lands, as he wasn't much of a traveller; and the Japanese are massive Tintin anoraks (despite the fact their country was badly represented in one book.) Most of this trivia was dispensed by "Tintinologist" Mr. Farr during a train journey with Joly somewhere in the middle of this mercifully short half-hour.
I can imagine a fantastic documentary on Tintin being made some day, and we'll probably get one when the Spielberg/Jackson marketing muscle is in full flex, but this pre-emptive Channel 4 effort felt lacklustre, pointless, not particularly enlightening, and tragically unfunny. Joly just didn't convince me he was a genuine fan of Tintin, while the idea to follow in Tintin's footsteps just didn't work as I think it was intended. At no point did I care about Joly's trip, I'd rather have listened to Mr. Farr's insights into Hergé's oeuvre.
19 MARCH 2010: CHANNEL 4 (HD), 7.30PM
