CLAUDIA CONNELL: How lovely to see people eating out – even on a garage forecourt

Remarkable Places To Eat

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Tutankhamun In Colour

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Going out to enjoy a meal, remember that? 

And how about sitting in close proximity to your dining partner and not having to wipe the cutlery down with antibacterial wipes before tucking in?

Those were the images of life before Covid-19 that the BBC taunted us with on Remarkable Places To Eat (BBC2). 

In search of authentic food, rather than tourist traps serving Westernised versions of local dishes, maitre d’ Fred Sirieix visited Marrakesh with food writer and chef Andi Oliver, who promised to open her little black book of secrets and treat him to some real Moroccan cooking.

Filmed pre-lockdown and with tourists outnumbering locals two to one, hawkers stood on every street corner trying to lure diners in with laminated menus showing lurid photos of their offerings.

By-passing them all, Andi took Fred to Al Fassia a few miles outside the Medina, a restaurant run by the Chaab sisters, with a kitchen staffed entirely by women — and no head chef.

The pair munched their way through 15 salads and the restaurant’s signature slow cooked lamb, so succulent a dish that it sent Fred into absolute raptures.

The next day he visited the farm where his lamb had been raised, which felt a little, well, sadistic. Why would you want to see the happy first home of the animal you’d just wolfed down?

Fred’s enthusiasm felt somewhat forced at times. I’m not sure that what looked like pretty ordinary bread and an omelette merited quite so many superlatives when he and Andi went for breakfast.

His introduction to the ‘real’ Marrakesh concluded with him enjoying a traditional chicken tagine at a restaurant where locals ate. The feast looked mouth-watering, the surroundings less so as Al Baraka is on a petrol station forecourt.

There was nothing particularly original about this two-parter. But Fred’s charm, Andi’s passion for cooking and the sight of people actually eating in restaurants while on holiday made it far more joyous than it would, ordinarily, be.

Trips to Egypt may also be off limits but, as we discovered in Tutankhamun In Colour (BBC4), in the 1920s it was the place to go for wealthy Europeans.

The reason they were flocking there rather than the south of France was down to the most famous archaeological discovery of all time — the tomb of Tutankhamun, in 1922, by British Egyptologist Howard Carter.

This moment was captured on black-and-white stills and old cinema newsreel. But the images were grainy and damaged.

Oxford professor Elizabeth Frood, an Egyptologist, hoped colourisation specialists might be able to bring Carter’s discovery to life. Colouring old footage is a skilled and painstakingly laborious process. But, as we saw when Peter Jackson used this method in his World War I film They Shall Not Grow Old, it can transform history for us.

Thanks to the skilled colour artists, Professor Frood was able to really see the contents of the first chamber of the tomb —including gilded chariots, chairs and statues of gods all piled up.

It took another three years before the coffin of the Boy King was found. The moment when Carter and his team lifted the lid to reveal the now famous golden mask suddenly came alive.

Carter was described as a prickly, difficult man, but perhaps that’s what a decade of digging in the blazing heat does to you. It was wonderful to see the Pharaoh’s tomb just as he had all those years ago.

Christopher Stevens is away.

Fright of the night:  Dawn, from Cumbria, went on You Are WhatYou Wear (BBC1) because she said her scruffy clothes made her look like a ‘raving redneck’. Unfortunately, by the time the stylists had finished, she looked like Velma from Scooby-Doo.