CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews last night’s TV: £80 for a high-tech mug to keep tea hot! Why not buy a Thermos?
How To Spend It Well At Christmas
Our Guy In Japan
Rating: 
The five magical words that sum up the yuletide spirit are not Tiny Tim’s cry of ‘God bless us, every one!’ in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. No, the phrase that counts is: ‘Did you keep the receipt?’
Few festive sensations are more miserable than the one of unwrapping a pressie that you loathe… especially if you’ve spent a small fortune on a gift in return.
Phillip Schofield seemed determined on How To Spend It Well At Christmas (ITV) to seek out the most egregious wastes of money, the most pitiful presents that anyone would dread finding under the tree on December 25 — then urged us to buy them.
Phillip Schofield (with his wife Steph) seemed determined to seek out the most egregious wastes of money and urge us to buy them
Most highly recommended was a voucher for a morning spent in an ice-cold lake trying to balance on boots that boost you aloft on jets of water. Half an hour of being bruised and half-drowned costs £95. Second place was awarded to a bottle of champagne with your face engraved on the glass — which, of course, doubled the cost.
And if you had cash left over, Phillip warmly approved of a battery powered mug that keeps tea warm for an hour — at £79.95.
Here’s an idea: Sellotape a selfie to a bottle of prosecco and treat yourself to a Thermos. You’ve just saved a hundred quid.
Every year this show adds to my conviction that, at its worst, Christmas can be a horrible waste of everyone’s hard-earned savings.
Parents in particular can feel compelled to throw away fistfuls of money they can’t afford. And as for dog-lovers… we might as well file for bankruptcy now.
Guest presenter Clare Balding invited a party of pooches to taste doggie crisps, popcorn and sparkling ‘wine’, before deciding that what our pets really deserve is a mutt-friendly mince pie: price, £4.50 for two.
I’d sneer, except I’m guiltily aware that my family’s own spoilt hound will be getting a new collar-and-lead set, decorated with Christmas puds. Honestly, what comes over us at this time of year?
The best thing about these annual consumer round-ups is Phillip’s double act with his long-suffering wife, Steph. Though she usually shies away from the cameras, Mrs S sportingly helps out with the Christmas show.
An electric muscle massager caught her attention. ‘It’s like sitting on a washing machine,’ she said. Ever the telly pro, her husband responded with a quip — but, just for a moment, his face was open-mouthed with surprise. He doesn’t have to cope with sauce like that from Holly Willoughby.
Motorbike ace Guy Martin was open-mouthed with surprise, too, as he realised that his camera crew had all eaten Japanese noodle soup or ramen before, and he was the only one who had never heard of it.
An eternal innocent abroad, the speed king from Lincolnshire wandered around Tokyo, on Our Guy In Japan (C4), in a state of bafflement. He watched an automatic crane storing pedal bikes in an underground garage and spluttered: ‘How trick is that?’
Standing in an overflow chamber for the city’s storm drains, a cavern the size of Buckingham Palace, he blurted out: ‘That’s a lot of bloody watter!’
There’s lots to like about Guy, but nothing more endearing than the way he says ‘watter’ for water. Taking lessons in etiquette from his translator, he was so desperate to appear polite that on his first bow his head almost hit his knees.
Then he learned the phrase ‘doma doma,’ a casual greeting. Guy worked it out: ‘That’s how you say al-reet, cock!’