Raymond Blanc's an easy watch, mainly because the kitchen magician always seems so cheerful.

With his broken English and over-excitement at being confronted by an exotic legume, he's one of television's more benign onscreen chefs. In his latest venture, The Very Hungry Frenchman, he's wandering around his homeland, cooking regional favourites and speaking with the locals. And it's from these conversations that the only problem with the format arise.

We followed Blanc as he visited Maman Blanc, his 90 year old mother, to who he apparently owes all his skills. He took in a meal at a small restaurant called Auberge the moment he touched down in his hometown, Franche Comte, describing the local delicacies as he stuffed his face with them, making a jaunt to the east of France seem suddenly very appealing. This hour of food-based field-tripping also took in the bleeding and skinning of a rabbit, discussion of a particularly yeasty wine from the region and also some info on the cows that produce comte cheese, growing chard and smoking sausages, before Blanc used all the ingredients he'd sourced to cook a massive meal for locals and his family.

A nice enough trip, all in, furnished with some details from Blanc's history thrown into the mix, including a glimpse at where he started out, cleaning toilets before working his way up to waiter status. But one thing rankled throughout the hour, and threatened to drive the viewer to complete distraction.

Despite the programme involving a lot of non-English speakers, there was a real scarcity of subtitles, with the producers clearly assuming that we weren't interested in what any of the natives had to say. Instead, the soundtrack was plastered with an unending voiceover describing every single aspect, to the point it felt like we were watching radio show with accompanying visuals.

It's impossible to tell why they thought it'd be a good idea to totally saturate this offering with wall-to-wall narration whilst leaving the occasional French sentence completely untranslated. Perhaps they believe we all speak French fluently. Or perhaps they judged Blanc's countrymen and women to be unworthy of transcription. Or, more likely, they think we're way too lazy to read subtitles and thus need a happy-go-lucky speaker to tell us exactly what's going on, right before our eyes. I propose that we're not, and that some more subtitles might have been a good thing.