Oh, Clare Balding, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways. Or at least allow me to gaze, rapt and grubby-kneed, from a roadside verge as you puff past on your vintage bicycle, thighs pumping like pistons, fringe bouncing like a blonde trampette in the Shropshire breeze. Such scenes are legion in Britain By Bike (BBC4), a robust, all-weather travelogue that finds the abundantly capable sports anchor gasping over hill and wheezing across dale on her "lovely hand-built Dawes Super Galaxy".
After last week's exertions in Devon, this second instalment featured a 28-mile ride through the Welsh borders – a journey first recorded by one Harold Briercliffe, an enthusiast whose 60-year-old Cycling Touring Guides provide the backbone of Balding's series.
The views were spectacular. Bottle-green hills loomed over ramshackle cottages, cotton-ball sheep ruminated in velvet meadows, chuckling eccentrics appeared from behind hedgerows, greeting Balding with armfuls of local history. One woman had written a song about her village's annual tree-dressing pageant ("Join our Arbor Tree festival / In the village of Aston on Clun!"). The warden of a 17th-century almshouse recalled how impoverished farm workers were supplied daily with a pint of milk and a pint of beer (the former proving "significantly less popular" with the horny-handed patrons). A 92-year-old acquaintance of Briercliffe discussed the halcyon days of bicycling and the concomitant spirit of al-fresco bonhomie, declaring: "Once you've made a cycling friend, you've made them for life." Here was tradition, patriotism, folk history and nostalgia, all spread out like a sumptuous picnic. Even the statistics swelled the heart. "Eighty-three per cent of Shropshire is still given over to agriculture," boomed Balding approvingly, as the camera swooned over a patchwork quilt of thick greens and lustrous summer yellows.
Throughout, Briercliffe remained a steady but elusive presence, scowling out from yellowing photographs, bespectacled and tweedily inscrutable. "I can see him today with his . . . gnarled expression," recalled an elderly acquaintance. Was that the faintest trace of a shudder? Still, it would have been churlish to disallow the cyclist his gruffness: Briercliffe's passion for his hobby was pivotal in encouraging and prolonging the postwar cycling boom. Balding, meanwhile, was having a blast. Removed from her natural habitat, shorn of earpieces, monosyllabic rugby players and Willie Carson, she has never seemed so engaged or playful. This was Balding Unleashed. Balding In Excelsis. Baldin' 2: Electric Boogaloo. At one point, perched on Offa's Dyke – an ancient linear earthwork that roughly follows the boundary of Wales and England – she whooped delightedly as she related the fate that once awaited any Englishman or Welshman who dared cross the divide. "Ears chopped off. Hung. Ears chopped off. Hung . . . " she panted, hopping from foot to foot like a toddler at a nursery fitness class. Alas, such exertions were not without their price. "Grow up, Clare. Just done me knee in," she gasped, wincing. "Serves me right. Harr harr!" What a gal. More power to her pedal.
The first episode of Baby Beauty Queens (BBC3) followed two young girls as they entered the annual Mini Miss UK pageant. The early signs were predictably bleak: six-year-old Eden frolicked and posed among the fuchsia Lycra and shredded red lace of her mum's monstrous "fashion" boutique; Amber's mother Sally barked at her daughter for refusing to use castanets during her flamenco routine ("Spaniards are nothing without castanets!"). But what followed was a sweet and unassuming account of the modern British beauty pageant – an institution comprised, on this evidence at least, as much of backstage cuddles and cheerfully shambolic amateurism as it is parental pushiness and X Factor-induced delusion.
At the finals in Milton Keynes, Amber wriggled her tiny shoulders in a halter-neck and was awarded a polyester sash embossed with the words MOST WELL-MANNERED. The charmingly ditsy Eden sang Breaking Free in a voice that could flatten a High School Musical lunchbox at a thousand paces and was declared Best Poser (a compliment, apparently). Everyone involved seemed absolutely delighted. "Aren't you clever," enthused Eden's mum, Fathom. Your heart melted like a flammable legwarmer.