Japan with Sue Perkins: New travel show strikes perfect balance between cultural discovery and comedic silliness

Here’s one incentive for anyone considering a career in stand-up comedy: get far enough and one day you’ll probably have your own travel TV show.

All those evenings being heckled at an open mic night in Thornton Heath will feel like a distant bump in the road when you’re being paid by Netflix to swim in an Icelandic lagoon cracking gentle jokes about the sulphur smell.

Russell Howard and his mum, Jack Whitehall and his dad, Joel Dommett and Nish Kumar, Romesh Ranganathan, Dara Ó Briain ... the producers at Mock the Week must be sweating to fill the slots now that half their regulars are off on a gap year.

But even in a saturated market Sue Perkins is a cut above. In her latest show, Japan with Sue Perkins, she strikes the perfect balance between cultural discovery and comedic silliness. The premise — explore the nation gearing up to host the 2020 Olympics — sees her immerse herself in some of the most eccentric elements of its culture.

She begins in the capital, Tokyo, bonding with a group of female sumo wrestlers, who are currently banned from competing at a professional level because they’re women. Then it’s over to the suburb of Meguro to visit a family who were early adopters of Japan’s robot tech wave. Along with their three dogs they own £4,000 robot pup Toto, who imitates one of the real dogs and starts humping Sue’s leg.

Their other droid, Pepper, is a sort of cyborg Mary Poppins, reading bedtime stories and helping the eldest daughter with her violin practise. As Sue discovers, “even the scatter cushions are hardwired for love”, with creepy, mechanised furry tails that wag when you stroke them.

Japan may be at the technological cutting edge but it also has a famously punishing work culture. At a camp near Mount Fuji, Sue learns about Salary Man, an “icon” of the country’s modern culture, who joins a company as a graduate and is expected to “sacrifice everything for a job for life”. She joins a group of real salary men sent to a business school called Hell Camp — a cross between a work away day and an SAS training facility. Eighty per cent will fail, Sue says, and go back to their workplaces in “shame”.

Meanwhile, at a bridal salon back in Tokyo, a young woman called Rina has come for a “solo wedding” — a marital photoshoot minus the groom. “I want to wear the dress and take a picture of myself,” she says. Solo weddings are apparently growing in popularity in Japan. Rina talks disparagingly of “freeter” men — the nickname for ineligible bachelors who work as freelancers. If she fell in love with one, she says she would ask him to join a company.

One thing that makes the show so watchable is Sue’s natural rapport with the people she meets (language barrier notwithstanding), and it’s nice to see her doing more than delivering winky one-liners on Bake Off. Plus, the jokes never feel insensitive or cruel, even when she suggests a nice “forest bathing” therapist could be a serial killer.

This isn’t exactly a deep dive into Japan’s culture but you’ll probably learn something new — and even if you don’t, it’s entertaining enough.

Japan with Sue Perkins is on BBC One, tonight at 9pm

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