The Wu factor

Have I Got News For You regular panelist and comedian Paul Merton is treading in the footsteps of fellow funny people Michael Palin and Victoria Wood as he embarks on a TV tour of China. Sometimes he's a good guide, sometimes a bemused traveller and sometimes too silly for words.

In her recent BBC1 travel show, Wood managed to be both serious and amusing. Merton is too much the clown, although keeping a straight face takes great self-discipline while being asked to eat donkey penis, ride in a robot-pulled rickshaw or stay in a replica of a 17th century French chateau.

China is a fascinating country, full of contrasts with displays of both great wealth and great poverty all too apparent.

Merton touched down in Beijing, which resembles a building site in preparation for the 2008 Olympics. Many of the skyscrapers under construction will remain empty after the games because ordinary Chinese people can't afford to live there.

Tackling the local cuisine is an obvious place to start. Merton is apprehensive about the counter overflowing with bugs on sticks, feeling it "looks less like a barbecue and more like an insect collection at the Natural History Museum". He goes to a restaurant where donkey penis is on the menu. "Well, I can tell he wasn't Jewish," he jokes as his meal arrives.

He visits Tiananmen Square, remembered by most not as the world's biggest public square but as the scene of clashes between protestors and police in 1989. Today, visitors are observed by hundreds of CCTV cameras, as well as military and undercover police. Merton feels he's being watched as he meets his translator Emma.

He rejects her suggestion of seeing the Great Wall of China in favour of visiting Mr Wu, who makes robots out of other people's rubbish. Despite having no formal training, he constructs amazing robots of all shapes and sizes. Merton is suitably impressed with his ride in a rickshaw pulled, a little jerkily admittedly, by a life-size robot.

He also visits a part of Beijing, the hutongs, that's disappearing. These traditional, crowded neighbourhoods, where people often live in a single room, are likely to be demolished in the name of progress.

Unlike Merton, residents won't be put up in Hotel Chateau Lafitte, built at a cost of 50 million dollars by a prominent member of the Communist Party.

Another sort of party - a karaoke party - is happening under Merton's room, itself the size of a small country. He goes down in his dressing gown to complain and ends up singings with these strangers.

The strangers in the Cutting Edge documentary are au pairs, often young women from abroad with little command of the English language and no more experience of child-minding.

"You have to put all your trust into someone you don't know very well," says Claire, a mother of three boys - aged eight, four and two - aiming to resume her nursing course.

Gilly needs help looking after seven-year-old Poppy, although this self-assured youngster appears quite capable of looking after herself. The third household seeking an au pair is headed by Andrew, left by his wife to raise their two children.

Their methods of finding an au pair don't seem very thorough. Claire finds one through the internet, picks her up at the station and says that if she likes the boys she's got the job.

Gilly does at least check the CVs of the 85 people who reply to her advertisement and interviews the best, allowing Poppy to put questions too.

Andrew's selection method is more basic. Whoever phones first is the winner, he explains. His child-rearing methods seem quite free and easy too, as he's still trying to get his five-year-old to go to bed at midnight.

Claire welcomes her Turkish au pair with a glass of wine. Back home, she works in a bank and has come to this country to improve her language skills, not through any great desire to work with children.

Soon she's in tears, saying she misses her country and her life. Her English may be limited but she knows enough to tell us: "I'm fed up".