Apart from all our other problems, it would seem that the British are also now a nation suffering from a kind of advanced gastromania. It's not what we actually consume; often this has nothing to do with it. Instead, it's the way we obsess over what we might consume. It's not just the way that thinking and talking about food is now a substitute for all kinds of other, more real pleasures. It's the way that people dissect a visit to Waitrose or Tesco as if it were a trip to the Louvre, and then find that a visit to an art gallery can all too easily resemble a trip to the supermarket. Here is a brief selection of recent edible arts available in Britain: Jim Crace's The Devil's Larder, a highbrow novel about disgusting food; Peter Mayle's Bon Appetit, an emetic - sorry, appetising - account of "travels through France with knife, fork and corkscrew"; assorted programmes on BBC2 such as Food and Drink, Friends for Dinner and various Ainsley Harriott vehicles, too numerous and too terrible to list; What's Cooking?, a feel-good culinary chickflick; Food Mania, "an extraordinary visual record of the art of food" published by Thames and Hudson; and in the field of journalism, the Observer Food Monthly, a whole magazine dedicated to food, which in turn contains a column by Philip French on the greatest food moments in celluloid.
But in the midst of all this gastrolunacy, one person stands alone, like a shining beacon - Jamie Oliver, who is an art form unto himself. Many people, it has to be admitted, cannot stomach the man. Some of those people also read or write for this magazine. Decca Aitkenhead reviewed his latest book for the NS in the most disparaging terms, recoiling from his corny colloquialisms - his "pukka" and his "dool-ally" - as if she had rotten plums in her mouth. But Oliver is not to be appreciated in literary terms. What the Naked Chef offers is not literature, and not "cool", but an extended performance. You may well find something phoney in the way he pretends we are glimpsing his real life, his flat- sharing, mates-round-for-dinner, "dancing in the moonlight" existence with his "lovely wife, Jools". But of course it's phoney. Who said a performance is meant be real? What's more, as a performance, the Naked Chef is not only entertaining but, on balance, a genuine force for good.
(I should say at once, however, that all true Oliver fans recognise that the Sainsbury's ads are a grotesque exception, which debase the currency. If you know him only from these, you do not know him at all. Even the producers of his original TV show are embarrassed by them, I'm told.)
At his recent roadshow, which I caught on its Cambridge leg, Oliver made it absurdly clear that he realises what a joke his celebrity "lifestyle" is. The stage was made up like a twentysomething's flat, with jukebox, drum kit, beers in the fridge. He rode on to the stage at the Cambridge Corn Exchange on his roaring Honda motorbike (Honda was one of the sponsors of the show), in clouds of white ice, pretending he had just arrived from the mean streets of London. "What do you reckon to my new pad, then?" he asked, raising his eyebrows like a pantomime dame. He showed us video clips of his mum and dad remembering what a naughty little boy he was, of his wedding, of the restaurant with which he is now affiliated, of all the well-known accoutrements of this life he has created. When he collected herbs for cooking, they came out of a huge green cupboard making jungle noises, a joke on his collaboration with the Sainsbury's herb range. He milked all these gimmicks brazenly, without embarrassment, because he knew what was expected, by us and by the sponsors.
I thought I was going to hate the show. When they are badly done, these food roadshows, which often happen in shopping malls, are simply the lowest point of western civilisation. You can't smell the food, you can't taste it (unless you're one of the rare few volunteers allowed up on stage) and, if you are sitting at the back, you can barely even see it. All you see is some idiot jumping around in a busy apron, trying to sell his cookbook. It is a tribute to Oliver's boundless charisma and energy that, in front of ticket-paying spectators, he carried off two full hours of this genre, at the end of which we had been educated about food without even noticing it. Underneath the knowing Essex-boy banter, Oliver is a great pedagogue, who knows the limitations and prejudices of his audience and how to get through them. (And if he enriches himself in the process, so be it . . .)
"I've got the munchies," he informed us at the beginning. "Shall I go for a bit of Domino's pizza?" Murmurs of hungry assent came from the audience, a typical matinee crowd of schoolchildren and old people and bored housewives such as myself. We had to shout out toppings. Ham, pineapple and pepperoni were decided upon, a disgusting trio. Oliver picked up his phone and ordered it from the Yellow Pages, accompanied by gleeful audience laughter at the slow response of the pizza man. But then the Naked One set about making his own pizza, "Rustico Italiano Style", in the same time that it took the Domino's garbage to arrive. Proper bread dough, thinly rolled, a quickly made tomato sauce, fresh mozzarella, pancetta. We could see that all the ingredients came from Sainsbury's, but he also told us, rightly, that "it's going to be a damn sight tastier than something you'd get in a supermarket". It looked delicious and he explained it all beautifully, from kneading the dough to the optional trick of putting hot marble in the oven for the pizza to crisp on. We were with him all the way, until the Domino's pizza arrived and he theatrically threw it away unopened, when gasps of disapproval could be heard at the waste; most people, it seemed, would have been happy to eat it.
What lovely food he made, and what idiotic tricks he performed. He showed us how you could cook little parcels of cod, butter-beans, baby leeks, cream and wine in tinfoil, like a superior home-made ready-meal. In case we found this too boring or too posh, he simultaneously pretended to talk to his pregnant wife on the phone. He made a fragrant lamb curry, but lest we were threatened by its exotica, he also enthusiastically played us a terrible pop song he'd written called "Gonna give it to you hot", and pretended to be hosting a stag night. He turned a dish of pappardelle and lemon sauce into a Generation Game, with audience members getting covered in flour and pepper. He bantered with grown women (whom he called "darlin'" or "tiger") and small boys (whom he called "mate") on stage and pretended to make a cheesecake for Boy George. The whole Jamie Oliver brand represents the perfect disjunction between medium and message. The message is that anyone could and should cook, that it isn't a performance, that you should grow your own herbs, that it's easier, as well as better, making a pizza than ordering anything from Domino's. But the medium, all the clowning and the "lovely jubblies", tells us that cooking is indeed a performance, something comical and strange, and that if you aren't a superstar like Oliver, you're better off buying ready-mades from Sainsbury's.
It isn't at all clear, however, that Oliver is to blame for this. The more I watched, the more I felt that Oliver's personality was the only vehicle through which the British public are prepared to digest his delicious food, some of which is simply adapted from River Cafe recipes, without the off-putting hauteur. It may be annoying when he says he has made cooking acceptable for boys, but it may also be true. His next "mission", appropriately enough, is to teach children about food. In this country, we prefer our experts to be illiterate. When Oliver confessed on Parkinson that he had never read a book, despite having written three of them by the age of 26, the audience cheered. He treats us like the children that we are, softening harsh truths with banality. "Without sounding like a goody-goody or a preacher," he writes in his latest book, "in general kids' diets in Britain are a nightmare." To appease us, he adds: "I'm not saying it's a bad thing." He is speaking, as he charmingly puts it, to "Sheila from Sheffield and Billy from Bognor". But the great thing about Oliver is that, where most TV chefs dumb-down their recipes, he doesn't; the food itself is excellent (though he does sometimes overdo the herbs).
One of the Naked Chef's recent claims was that he was the greatest ambassador of British food abroad for a hundred years. Yet his food is about as British as Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins, so it's no wonder America loves him. While he extols British produce, much of what he makes is Italian with an Essex accent. When he does do real British puddings, he jokes around with the names, so Eve's pudding becomes "Sheila's pudding", and Queen of puddings is, for no obvious reason, "King of puddings". The strange thing is how successfully Oliver can sell this ersatz version of Britishness back to the British. The backdrop to his stage show was a theme-park London horizon, reminiscent of the episode of Friends when they came to the city. Olivertown is a more comforting place than the real capital, a palladium where no one eats chicken nuggets and everyone is "mates" with everyone else. When, in the interval in the foyer bar, after an hour of olive oil and euphoria, we encountered the real Britain again, the stale flapjacks and jostling for warm beer, there was a palpable air of disappointment.
When the great Czech intellectual Karel Capek visited England in the 1920s, he decided that the lack of joie de vivre in English life could partly be explained by the food: "the average cooking in the average hotel for the average Englishman explains to a large extent the English bleakness and taciturnity. Nobody can beam and warble while chewing pressed beef smeared with diabolical mustard. Nobody can exult aloud while unglueing from his teeth a quivering tapioca pudding." For all his contradictions and absurdity, Jamie Oliver is encouraging this troubled nation how to "beam and warble" again. And it's cheering to see.
Happy Days with the Naked Chef is published by Michael Joseph (£20)
