I have always been sceptical about travel.
How does one know, for instance, there really are any countries in the world other than New Zealand?
Who's to say the aeroplane pilot doesn't take you a couple of hundred kilometres out to sea, turn around, land somewhere, then tell you you are in Mexico? One has to suspend that disbelief for a moment to watch the recently introduced Travel Channel on Sky, and, perhaps, suspend one's uncertainty about travel generally.
Because travel, as an activity, carries with it some inherent dangers.
One that springs to mind is the possibility of the demise of the sort of long-held prejudices to which one becomes deeply attached.
Prejudices become, with age, like the well-worn, fleece-lined slippers you slip comfortably into at the end of every day.
Prejudices provide succour and consolation for areas of the intellect indolent, calcified and intolerant, and provide answers for the imponderable issues of life.
Kiwi filmmakers Julian Hanton and Camilla Andersen put those quite plausible concerns aside to create Julian and Camilla's World Odyssey, along with cameraman Tom Fowlie and researcher Ian Hart.
The foursome left New Zealand, paying their own way, with a plan to travel the world and make a "backpacker" TV series, returning with hundreds of hours of film.
I don't know why I keep thinking of my dear old Aunty Philius, and her slide evenings after her return from Azerbijan, where she collected the human bones she developed into jigsaw puzzles.
Last week, Julian and Camilla went to Colombia.
The highlight was Julian's date with a former Colombian beauty queen, and his complete meltdown trying to keep a conversation going.
"Do you go on many dates?" he asks her.
"I have a boyfriend now," she tells him.
"Yes" he says uncomfortably.
"Look, Animal Planet's showing on the television," he says.
"Yes," she responds, followed by a long silence as deep embarrassment and total lack of flirting or even basic conversational skills cramp Julian's style.
• Closer to home, Bogan Family Films (C4, Thursdays, 10pm), stars former Dunedin boys and makers of the very excellent Back of the Y, Matt Heath and Chris Stapp.
Bogan Family Films, a sitcom of sorts, features all the usual scatological references, as well as cars that run over things, nudity, and, shock horror, a storyline (yes, a storyline) that may upset the religious.
What more could you ask?
