Review of the week: 50 Ways To Kill Your Mammy

Baz and his mum provide a surpisingly entertaining package.

The attentive among you will have noticed I haven’t been around for a couple of weeks. I’ve been on my holidays, part of which was a week on the Norfolk Broads with all my family to mark my dad’s 75th birthday.

Travelling at 4mph on a glorified duck pond may sound delightful, but according to my mum, who can’t swim and has a fear of water to the point where she views plumbers as exorcists, this was some kind of extreme adventuring.

So I was immediately drawn to a new series on Sky1 called 50 Ways To Kill Your Mammy, not because of the title, you’ll understand the holiday wasn’t that bad but due to the content.

Baz Ashmawy, 38, from Dublin describes himself as a bit of adventurer, and has travelled all over the world doing bungee jumps, whitewater rafting and other things that look like you could get hurt doing them.

That’s certainly the first thought that occurs to his 70-year-old mum, Nancy, a sort of churchgoing version of Mrs Brown who sees the danger in opening an envelope with too sharp a knife.

For our entertainment (and against my own better judgement, I did find it entertaining) Baz has drawn up a bucket list of things for his mum to do and this week had entered her into Stage 3 of the Intercontinental Rally from Spain to Senegal. I’m sure no one has ever pulled away (gingerly) from the start line of a rally event with the words, “Better to get there late than never,” but Nancy, a steady motorist who won’t have the radio on while driving lest it interfere with her concentration, thought that was the best way of going about things, much to co-driver Baz’s frustration.

They then got stuck trying to climb a sand dune and had to walk across the North African desert like “a weird Celtic version of R2D2 and C-3P0.”

Mum Nancy was also shown snake charming and hot air ballooning and played her part so well that I worry one day we’ll find out she’s not really Baz’s mum at all, but a retired stunt woman.

It certainly gave me a few ideas for my next family holiday.

50 Ways to Kill Your Mammy, Sky1, Monday.