CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews Accidental Tourist on ITV1: Ant and Dec treated their pal Stephen Mulhern’s phobias like a huge joke… and it left me cold

You’d think, after 30 years when they’ve never been off our tellies, Ant and Dec would trust us to be able to tell them apart.

And if the public can’t distinguish one grinning, hair-dyed, pinkly Botoxed Geordie from another, at least their friends ought to know which one’s which.

But when Stephen Mulhern, who first worked with them on children’s TV in 1998, arrived for a production meeting on Accidental Tourist, he found the duo at a desk with nameplates in front of them — Ant McPartlin and Dec Donnelly, in full.

And when the boys moved to a sofa, Dec even had a cushion with his own face on it. Perhaps it’s a good thing, after all, that the government is planning to bring in identity documents. These two will finally be able to relax a bit.

It will take more than digital ID to make Stephen relax. A cheeky entertainer and keen conjuror on screen, in real life he has panic attacks whenever circumstances start to spin out of his control.

Ant and Dec treated his neuroses as a huge joke. They found it hilarious that he couldn’t eat food with oily textures, such as hummus or mayonnaise, and that the idea of swimming in the sea left him a gibbering wreck.

He hates travelling, too. So the premise of this one-off show, a sort of extended Saturday Night Takeaway practical joke, was to strand him on the other side of the world, in South Korea — 5,000 miles outside his comfort zone.

That would be a better title than the one Ant and Dec devised. ‘Accidental Tourist’ implies Stephen stumbled into the prank, when in fact he made it clear throughout that he wouldn’t let the TV crew bully him into anything he wasn’t prepared to tackle.

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In the new ITV1 show Accidental Tourist, Ant and Dec took their friend Stephen Mulhern (centre) on a prank travel tour to South Korea

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Stephen admitted he was driven to vomit tackling one fear, and asked to strip naked in another as he took to a Korean spa (pictured)

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The presenter visibly recoils as he is shown some of the fresh produce at a Korean fish market

TOO SPICY FOR ELEPHANTS

Pepper spray of the weekend: Mango farmers in Zambia were plagued by elephants who came at night to scoff the fruit, in Kingdom (BBC1). They fought back with pellets of chilli oil. Splattered with hot spice, the animals retreated in a huff. Chilli must get right up their trunks.

At a fish market, he tried swallowing bites of raw prawn and octopus, with a woman named Leeby — a star of the Korean craze for mukbang, where young people gorge themselves on platefuls of noodles and barely dead seafood. He spat out anything he didn’t fancy.

Then he visited a naked sauna, where he remained well covered at all times. If Ant and Dec were hoping to provoke a flash of the Mulhern bottom, he was having none of it.

‘In all the time I’ve been on TV,’ he declared, ‘I’ve never shown any part of my body, not even my feet.’

Finally, he went for a dip in the sea . . . and proved to be a strong swimmer.

Though he pretended to be at the mercy of the joke, he was clearly in control at all times. If boundaries were pushed, it was by his choice.

There was so little real footage of him in a tizz that most of this pilot episode consisted of filler and repetition. Any hopes of an entire series are as cold and unappealing as a squid in a Korean fish market.