This looked alright in the listings, so I thought I would give it a go. The mark of a good documentary series of this sort is to let a presenter's personality mingle with the alien culture he's observing... and that's it. Just let them get on with it, so we can follow their journey. We can get scared when they get scared, be elated when they get elated and so on. I was hoping for that kind of relationship with Chris and Xan Van Tullekan.

Then they travelled eastwards to Congo, where they hooked up with a tribe called the Bayaka. As they gently rowed down the river, the jungle canopy getting more and more dense with each stroke, Chris went for maximum foreboding style on his voiceover – “this is a disease factory”, “there’s disease everywhere”, “disease, I tell you, disease!”. I was a bit disappointed by this and it made me start off on the wrong foot with this programme – while something like Extreme Pilgrim was non-sensational, this was going for the jugglar in true shock-doc style. You don’t have to do this! Don’t treat us like idiots.

There was a serious point to be made in among all this tabloidy DISEASE screaming – this was where an explorer first contracted SIV (later re-named HIV) from an infected monkey. The boys were not looking forward to coming across monkeys.

They soon met up with the Bayaka and it was all go. The brothers discussed erectile disfunction for starters (as you do when you’re trying to break the ice and make new friends) and the tribe’s medicine man sped off into the jungle to find the requisite bits of bark to boil up a rod-on-inducing potion. It didn’t work on Chris. Then they accompanied the Bayaka as they hunted for crocodiles… under trees (that’s where they go when they hibernate). Their hunting techniques – basically sticking their heads in and having a rummage around – were astounding, and with that the programme suddenly started to get better and much more interesting. The more agile members of the Bayaka were soon shinning up trees reaching into bees’ nests for honey. Tesco’s this wasn’t.

Back at camp, a baby had come down with something. The tribe’s medicine man leapt into action. First, he collected bark and leaves, and boiled them up into eye drops. Chris and Xan, after a brief examination, determined that the little one had some sort of chest complaint, so they weren’t quite sure whether eye drops would help. The drops didn’t work, so then it was time for more mashed-up bark, applied to a little incision under the baby’s armpit. That didn’t work either.

Xan wasn’t happy. With a kit full of western medicine with him, he was finding it hard just standing by watching the baby’s condition get worse. It was like they were on Star Trek or something, and had to observe Star Fleet’s prime objective – not to interfere with another culture’s doings, or in this case undermining the tribe’s medicine man in front of his people. But they couldn’t stand by, so they had a word, received the blessing of the medicine man, diagnosed the baby with malaria and gave him some medicine. Job done.

Then they were confronted with their worse nightmare – monkeys. The Bayaka had gone without food for some days, so when one of them came back with a dosile monkey, the tribe celebrated. But the brothers, seeing blood in the monkey’s mouth and a general sickly demeanour about it, didn’t really fancy eating it one little bit. The horror stories of diseased monkeys were starting to echo about their heads. But they did – tastes like lamb apparently – and it was some welcome protein… until Chris (or was it Xan?) found a great big worm in his morsel. That’s why the monkey was ill… it had worms. And now they were eating it. Thank friggery I’m vegetarian.

So what did I think of this? Well, there were bits of Tribe, bits of Ray Mears and more bits of Tribe. I didn’t really like Chris and Xan too much, I have to say – their seemingly public school-blunted vowels didn’t give them too much warmth. I have nothing at all against public school-educated men and women, I simply don’t care where someone is educated, but… I dunno… their real personalities didn’t seem to come out that often. Maybe this was to do with the editing.

Chris seemed to be the one in favour of giving tribal medicine a go, while Xan was the sceptic. This was a nice edge, and gave the brothers something to at least argue about. Xan, when put into the position of trying to save the baby, found new respect for the tribe’s medicine man.

In terms of an insight into life in the jungle it was very fascinating, so it’s worth a watch. Better than the worse-than-awful Lenny Henry thing that’s on in the background as I write this.