Miriam And Alan: Lost In Scotland Review – A Big Pile Of Anticlimaxes.

Key points: 

• Margolyes and Cumming can’t be just about as lost as the helpless watchers took on this insipid and debilitating visit through Caledonia. 
• Complete with a cringeworthy experience with local people 

As Macbeth so almost appropriately said, a terrible travelogue is nevertheless a mobile shadow; a helpless player that swaggers and frets its hour upon the stage and afterwards is heard no more. It is a story told by a moron, brimming with sound and rage, connoting nothing. 

Less the rage, this is a reasonable synopsis of Miriam Margolyes and Alan Cumming’s Caledonian voyages – including an excursion to Cawdor Castle – in Miriam and Alan: Lost in Scotland (Channel 4), the first in an unapproachable and perhaps unreasonable series of three drawn-out scenes to follow them trundling around the innocent land in a campervan, “rediscovering” their foundations. 

Cumming experienced childhood with the Panmure domain, close to Carnoustie, on the east coast, where his dad was a head forester. Margolyes’ Jewish foreigner family got comfortable in Glasgow. One of the pair’s first visits is to Allison Street, where her dad resided as a component of a group of six in a few rooms before proceeding to turn into a specialist. In the first of what will become numerous vexing minutes, they get no farther than the (plainly new) front entryway of the structure that housed them some time ago. There’s likewise a cringe-worthy second when, as Margolyes is thinking back, a Glaswegian man on a portability bike stops to talk (he is captioned for watchers) and neither one of the moderators is very OK with the thought. “We’re having a delicate second!” cries Cumming, excessively snappishly to be entertaining.