TV dinners
As if eating food wasn't enough...
As if eating food wasn’t enough, it seems that a gluttonous amount of the TV schedules is dedicated to it as well.
Of course, these things go in cycles. At one point or another in TV history you couldn’t escape game shows, home renovation shows, talent and variety shows, reality shows with a tokenistic at best connection with reality, and it just so happens that in these five-a-day, organic conscious times we live in, food is the topic on all our lips.
As a result, that means that food-focused programmes aren’t keeping to the tried and tested “one I made earlier” motif. Perhaps the foodie show that has captured the public’s imagination most is Come Dine With Me, on Channel 4. Basically Strictly Come Dinnerpartying, the idea that four or five people would take turns cooking for each other and then mark them out of ten hardly seems like ratings gold, but this show has two special things going for it. For starters, the wiseass narration of Dave Lamb gives it a certain comedic edge, an edge sharpened by the sideshow loons that apply, such as the Bolton woman who fell asleep while cooking her main course, leaving another guest to serve it up, or the wildly smug and hubristic foodies who end up bombing spectacularly once they actually try to cook something. You try not watching it with antics like that!
The uptake in wannabe chefs is due in no small part to the prevalence of the celebrity chef, a stable which keeps getting bigger and bigger. Gone are the days where TV cooking were monopolised by Delia Smith or Rachel Allen’s mum, now you’ve got a chef for every mood: the eternally happy Ainsley Harriot, the eternally sweary Gordon Ramsey, the endearingly and enduringly mad Heston Blumenthal, and of course Nigella Lawson, a woman for whom only post-watershed adjectives truly do justice. And there’s not just a chef for every mood, but one for every cause too. Jamie Oliver’s reformation of school dinners has ensured his legacy, while Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s campaign for self-sufficiency and humane treatment of supermarket chickens has changed how we think about the food we consume.
And of course, as with most other genres, there’s always space for an old show given a reshape. Masterchef nowadays is a far cry from the very genteel affair it was under the auspices of Loyd “Dayvid, it’s ohwvurr to yeeuuu” Grossman, it resembling more of an intense cooking boot camp compered by three opinionated top line chefs, who often argue with each other so much that you wonder why more under fire contestants don’t just sneak out while they’re in full flow. Of course, the show is now more popular than ever, so much so that it’s spawned that most sure sign of success, the celebrity offshoot.
It doesn’t even end there. The Supersizers’ series explored eating habits throughout the ages, from the Tudor era to the 1980’s, while The Big Food Fight took eating onto the fertile soil of quiz/panel shows. So it seems wherever you go at the minute, there’s plenty of food for thought. And viewing.
Your Comments
There are no comments for this article yet, please leave one!
Login to leave a comment on this article
Login | Sign Up