Rick Stein's Wokabout

It struck me the other day, while watching Rick Stein’s Asian Odyssey, that something didn’t quite sit right. Not the food – Stein could make a bowl of instant noodles sound like haute cuisine – but the title. Odyssey. In Asia.

Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but Homer didn’t have Ulysses island-hopping round the Bay of Bengal in search of the perfect prawn curry. He was busy faffing about the Aegean, dodging angry gods and getting his men turned into pigs. (Though, to be fair, that's probably how most blokes on a lads' holiday end up in Magaluf.)

An odyssey, by definition, is a Mediterranean saga – wine-dark seas, Trojan grudges, and the kind of sulking that’d put Piers Morgan to shame. Slapping that label on an Asian jaunt is like calling a pub crawl through Bristol a Grand Tour.

If anything, it should’ve been Rick Stein’s Silk Road Sojourn – conjuring images of camel caravans and spice-laden traders, rather than Homer in a sarong. Or Rick Stein’s Wokabout, if we’re keeping it light. He could’ve gone full history buff with The Curry Compass or The Spice Trail. Even Rick Stein’s Marco Polo would’ve worked – though given Polo’s reputation for exaggeration, Stein might have had to claim he discovered the world's largest samosa in Rajasthan.

But no, someone in BBC marketing clearly thumbed through a thesaurus, found “Odyssey,” and thought, “That’ll do.” Asia? Mediterranean? Same difference. It’s a bit like calling Escape to the Country The Grapes of Wrath.

So here’s my plea: if we’re going to borrow classical terms, can we at least get the geography right? Call it The Dumpling Diaries, Soy to the World, or Curry On, Rick. Just don’t pretend Ulysses swapped Ithaca for Ipoh in search of laksa.

Otherwise, we’ll be calling David Attenborough’s Planet Earth The Iliad next.