Jamie’s Ministry of Food (Channel 4, Tuesday); Ian Hislop Goes off the Rails (BBC4, Thursday)
‘People have a problem with me,’ claims Jamie Oliver, but I’m not one of them. I’ve had my doubts in the past — overuse of phrases like ‘luvly jubbly’, the Sainsbury’s ads, the general extreme jealousy of his stupendous wealth, ruining my daughter Poppy’s name by calling one of his daughters Poppy and starting a massive trend — but I love his new campaigning series Jamie’s Ministry of Food (Channel 4, Tuesday), just as I loved his last campaigning series Jamie’s School Dinners and his ‘Look, I can still cook you know and, by the way, check out what a luvly jubbly, pukka vegetable garden I can now afford’ series Jamie at Home. The guy’s a genius.
His new campaign finds him in Rotherham — ‘****ing ****ed off’, as usual, for Jamie is not the sort to allow Gordon Ramsay to get too far ahead in the Roger Mellie sweary celebrity stakes — trying to teach fat northerners how to cook. He has chosen Yorkshire because obesity levels are particularly high there, and Rotherham in particular because it is the home of his arch-nemesis Julie Critchlow.
Critchlow, you may remember, was ‘the fat old scrubber’ (Jamie’s words) with dyed blonde hair and bingo wings who was shown on TV news stories taking fish and chip orders through the railings of her local primary school. It was her way of flicking two fingers at Jamie’s evil plan — as seen on Jamie’s School Dinners — to wean Britain’s kids on to food that wasn’t saturated with lard, carcinogens, ground turkey beaks, and E numbers.
Jamie’s first canny move was to butter up Julie.
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