Kevin McCloud’s Rough Guide to the Future: why is he here, again?

A question I suppose we all must ask ourselves, at some point in our lives: why is Kevin McCloud here, again? Shh, don’t ask too loudly: Kevin McCloud is just over there, blazer over a sweater, flicking his head up at some panelling, inspecting your brickwork, fingers in your bank account, puzzling over how you went over budget. Did you invite Kevin McCloud in? Because I didn’t invite Kevin McCloud in, but Kevin McCloud is in. He’s like an architectural vampire: he cannot set foot into your house unless you give him explicit permission, can’t cross the threshold of the area you’ve taped out for windows unless you tell him he can do so. And yet here he is, in the corner of your comprehension, peering, McClouding, getting your wife pregnant without you noticing.

This is the recurring theme of Kevin McCloud’s Rough Guide to the Future (Wednesday, 9pm, Channel 4): Kevin McCloud is in it, but he does not need to be in it. “We drive too much, fly far too much, eat too much, and shop insatiably,” Kevin McCloud says, bombasting in front of some green screen. Is Kevin McCloud going to solve the future? Is technology the answer to the planet’s ills? The icebergs are melting, and I’m excited to find out what Kevin McCloud is going to do about it. And then: oh, right. It’s a travelogue.

So here’s the set-up: Kevin McCloud thinks technology can repair the planet, and he keeps saying so, alone in an eerie white studio, without ever really following up on that. And then Kevin McCloud goes away, and in his place Alice Levine and Jon Richardson and Phil Wang get on planes (dunno if you remember 100 words ago, when Kevin McCloud explicitly told us off for this) and go to Japan and America and China, and all peer at technology, wholly McCloudless.

“These cynics don’t believe me,” Kevin says, trapped in his studio prison, and then we watch as it starts off quite worthy (Phil Wang learns about insect farming; Jon Richardson consumes a synthetic chicken nugget; nobody seems particularly cynical) and then almost immediately veers into the same tired old don’t-other-cultures-do-things-a-bit-funny stuff. Jon Richardson’s car makes a fart sound and Alice Levine politely meets a man who is married to a robot. At the start of the show you expect Kevin McCloud to solve world hunger, and by the end of it you’re just watching the cardigan lad from 8 Out of 10 Cats get served coffee by a robot arm. I don’t know what this is in aid of.

Well, I do: it’s in aid of Vodafone 5G. Rough Guide to the Future is one of those corporate-sponsorship-in-the-shape-of-harmless-evening-TV mash-up events, where normal programming keeps looping back to mention the same brand name that lights up the advert pre-rolls. So 5G, we are told, will soon power driverless cars, allow workers to control robots from home, and offer various other advances that are not remotely related to “saving the environment”, and Vodafone is at the forefront of it. Essentially: Vodafone sent Phil Wang to China to eat a battered spider, and now we all have to get phone upgrades. Here, enjoy your TV show about the future. We’ll either marry robots or be dead.