CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews last night’s TV: Naming a child after your favourite pizza? That’ll take some topping!
Pizza Boys
Discovering Westerns On Film
Rating: 
Every dog you see these days has a human name. There’s a Staffie called Colin round our way.
Colin is fine for a postman, or the marketing manager of a garden centre in Milton Keynes, but it sounds strange for a terrier with a tennis ball obsession.
The pets looking for homes on Channel 4’s The Dog House mostly have children’s names, too. We met Zach, Grant, Sid and Casper, which sounds like the roll call in a Nineties primary school.
That makes it tricky for new parents who don’t want their little darlings to have doggy names. No one wants to risk christening their baby with a modern-day equivalent of Spot or Rover.
Welsh foodies Jez Phillips (left) and Ieuan Harry (right) motored around Naples in their three-wheeler on The Pizza Boys (BBC2)
Welsh foodies Jez Phillips and Ieuan Harry came up with the solution as they motored around Naples in their three-wheeler on The Pizza Boys (BBC2). Why not name your new arrival after your favourite snack?
Celebrities have been calling their sprogs after fruit for ages — Gwyneth Paltrow has Apple, Bob Geldof picked Peaches, Bear Grylls called his son Huckleberry.
As they were in Italy, Jez suggested biscuits for inspiration, starting with Garibaldi. You could always shorten it to Gary. I like Custard Cream for a girl, Bourbon for a boy. And who wouldn’t love a smooth, sophisticated name like Florentine? Ieuan favoured ice cream. He’s calling his first child Mint Choc Chip.
The boys were getting delirious by this stage because they’ve been stuck in the tiny cab of their mobile pizza stall for about 2,000 miles. We joined them on Monday in Cardiff, and tonight they end their journey in Parma, in the north of Italy, for the world pizza championships.
The pets looking for homes on Channel 4’s The Dog House mostly have children’s names
This time they tried their hand at making mozzarella from fior di latte and buffalo milk with a farmer sporting a walrus moustache who looked like Super Mario.
In Caiazzo, they visited a gourmet pizza restaurant to sample the house special — 11 dishes that began with deep-fried dough cones stuffed with cream, proceeded through all kinds of toppings including lemon zest, and ended with a giant Margherita.
It’s a charming twist on food and travel, but the rest of the evening’s telly made for challenging viewing — unless you still had room for a double bill of MasterChef on BBC1.
Black Power: A British Story Of Resistance on BBC2 was an hour and a half of hard-hitting, gruelling and thought-provoking television.
Eventually, I stumbled on Discovering Westerns On Film (Sky Arts), where a trio of critics were discussing classic movies amid antique furnishings and gilt-framed Old Masters in the drawing room of a stately home — a funny place for three middle-aged chaps in suits and ties to ponder the Wild West.
Discovering Westerns On Film: ‘an entertaining survey of an unfashionable genre’
Still, this was an entertaining survey of an unfashionable genre, that left me longing to watch some of those beautifully stylised and laconic films again.
The analysis was measured, with plenty of emphasis on the plot as well as discussion of what made each film uniquely important. That was a welcome contrast to Mark Kermode’s take in his BBC4 series, which amounts to a frenzy of clips and disjointed ideas. It began with relative obscurities, such as Joan Crawford in Johnny Guitar, and Fort Apache, starring Shirley Temple as the marvellously named Philadelphia Thursday.
The top slots went to John Wayne in The Searchers, and Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time In The West — a controversial choice for No1, when Clint Eastwood couldn’t score higher than fourth, with Unforgiven.
Add to that James Stewart, Gregory Peck, Henry Fonda, James Coburn… is there a single star their equal today?