OUR MAN IN . . .

By Clive Anderson

BBC publications, #16.99 (pp 240)

SOMEWHERE within the covers of this TV tie-in lurks the germ of an

idea for an important book and, things being what they are in the

wonderful world of the media, an even more important television series.

Beneath the glossy pictures, the limp gags, and the self-deprecatory

smugness that is Clive Anderson's speciality, the proposition is

advanced that modern life, and holidays in particular, are a very bad

idea.

Environmentalists have been saying so for years, of course, but since

they commence from a position of absolute virtue -- that the least human

beings do by way of existing is the best they can do -- the assault on

leisure has hitherto made little ground among the migratory mob. Now

holidaymakers themselves, desiring nothing more shocking than a

fortnight away from the daily grind, are beginning slowly to notice the

damage they do. Evidence accumulates of a horrible irony: that we

destroy the things we slave and save to enjoy just by travelling to

enjoy them.

Towards the end of his chapter on Goa, Anderson remarks: ''Tourism,

someone told me, is now the biggest industry in the world.'' Someone was

right: the travel trade is all that and more, capable of being

construed, without much hyperbole, as the new imperialism, a continuing

process of invasion and despoliation on a scale more vast than anything

the British Empire ever conceived. Modern tourism will have more lasting

impact than any war, and has more influence on economies and foreign

policies than any ideology. It means no real harm, like a virus without

evil intent, but it kills its hosts.

Television involves a similar contradiction, and as Anderson

shamefacedly admits, ''. . . making a TV programme and writing a book

about a place like Goa, even though they focus on the problems of

tourism, is likely to attract more people than it repels . . . So I am

part of the problem and not the solution.''

That contradiction is also part of his book's problem. This

good-looking volume is part reportage, part jaunty travelogue, and part

a serious investigation of issues with profound implications. What are

we supposed to do? Stay at home? And what then of the countries --

Scotland prominent among them -- living in the belief that only the

tourist dollar saves them from penury? Is development always bad? Must

the world become ever more homogenised? Anderson raises the issues but

prefers, for the most part, to supply the drolleries demanded of his

prime-time TV persona than to address them.

The travel trade pops up again and again as a thread in the book's

general, weary theme of ''trouble in paradise''. Here we have the

encroachment of the modern world on Kenya's Maasai Mara; Dominica caught

in the machinations of the world banana market; socialist Cuba crushed

by America and deserted by its children; the movement for autonomy in

ruined Hawaii; the war between loggers and conservationists in Oregon.

Insatiable Western society is depicted as consuming, literally and

spiritually, the beautiful places and things it most admires.

This is an important idea, largely because its ramifications have yet

to be explored fully, and you get the impression that Anderson might

have preferred to investigate it in more depth than he has -- even the

trite title was a compromise -- but the ''recognition factor''

afflicting a chat-show host overwhelms him. Good, serious passages

invariably give way to the cute, the quaint, and the relentlessly

''entertaining''. Our Man In . . . is itself almost a parable of the

processes it investigates.

The book reads like five long magazine articles. Anderson's TV voice

intrudes continually -- ''The other vehicles . . . are mostly Ladas.

Lada cars, stretch Ladas, Lada taxis. Taken and driven away, no doubt,

by Lada louts.''

In the end, you feel Our Man sensed he was on to something but

couldn't decide quite what it was, how it might be dramatised, or how

the result might be sold to the vast sedentary audience watching while

they planned their two weeks in the sun. The photographs, on the other

hand, are pretty as postcards.