KEY POINTS:
Now, I didn't come here to laugh at funny foreigners," said funny foreigner Victoria Wood in last night's Victoria's Empire (TV One, 7.30pm). But it does rather help if you are making a telly travel show when some of the foreigners turn out to be bonkers, to pinch
Wood's favourite word.
Not that she ran into many bonkers folk last night, it is just that, well, they do very strange things abroad.
She went to Hong Kong where she visited a shop that sold huge, very strange, golden sculptures of animals wearing suits.
"I'm from Lancashire. We don't flaunt, we tut," said Victoria. If she was really rich, she'd have a nice plain white toilet and she'd write on the seat: "I'm really rich. Now wash your hands."
She and her guide, a young ambitious Hong Kong Chinese woman, went to an antique shop where they were the only browsers. The Chinese are not sentimental about the past, she was told. Antique shops are for funny foreigners and expats. Where did her guide get her furniture? Ikea.
You sometimes got the feeling Victoria rather wondered what she was doing wandering around the remains of empire. She told us at the beginning: "A nice lady from a TV company said, did I want to go around the world visiting places called Victoria? I thought, 'hang on, that's not a TV programme, that's a holiday'."
She'd be good fun to go on holiday with (which is pretty much what you do when you watch these jaunty telly jaunts) but there has to be a better reason for a TV programme.
She managed to manufacture one. "Then I started to think, 'why are there so many places in the world called Victoria?' Well, obviously named after Queen Victoria - which I am. Then I thought, 'why was it okay for us to go round pointing at lakes and mountains and renaming them after this rather grumpy monarch who actually never went further than the Isle of Wight?'"
And who has a memorial in Kolkata which was Calcutta and was once the capital. It is now a provincial city - "oops!" - which boasts a very funny building.
"A bit like the love child of the National Portrait Gallery and the Taj Mahal."
Queen Victoria did once see an orang-utan. She found it to be "painfully, disagreeably human". As well she might have because when this Victoria met an orang-utan in Borneo she said, "gosh, they're grumpy, aren't they?"
She was in Borneo because, obviously, it had been part of the empire. It had riches, including sago.
She'd been to India to trace the British addiction to tea, and to Hong Kong to trace the Chinese addiction to opium. But Borneo? "As far as I know nobody has ever been addicted to sago."
She got bitten by a sago worm while being given a talk on sago by a sago producer. After getting bitten she said, "I've lost interest now". Which was jolly sensible, because so had we.
She had to eat bird's nest soup in Hong Kong. Bird's nest soup is made from bird spit. "Why," she asked, very sensibly, "did it ever occur to anybody to grab a bit of old bird's nest and make it into a soup?" Only very rich funny people of the sort who have golden bogs can afford bird's nest soup. Victoria said, "More soup! Any chance of a piece of toast?"
She comes to New Zealand. Perhaps she'll have to eat a huhu grub. But we can make her a nice cup of tea too, with hot buttered toast. Which is a good enough description of the programme the nice lady from TV persuaded Victoria to make.