Food
Bee Wilson on the best of TV dinners
Published 10 March 2003
Cable shows represent the best - and the worst - of gastronomic TV
Long, long ago, in the 1980s, those with an appetite for food on TV had to be satisfied with a sparse diet. You were lucky if there was even one programme a week, and it was usually either Delia or Food and Drink on BBC2, with Michael Barry doing "crafty" things in a food processor. Slackers and house-wives may also have enjoyed morning repeats of Ken Hom. How times change. Now there are enough food programmes on terrestrial TV to satisfy even the most bulimic of appetites. Yet to supplement this surfeit, there are also cable channels showing nothing but cookery from dawn till dusk, inventing ever more ridiculous concoctions for us to make in the kitchens that we hardly ever visit because we are too busy watching TV.
At their worst, as you might expect, the food channels' offerings are about as tacky and pointless as these things can be, leaving the viewer feeling trapped in Nietzsche's cycle of eternal recurrence. Day after day, chefs gather in bright studios to cook recipes that will benefit no one except, perhaps, their agents. A nadir was reached, I felt, when I glimpsed James Martin (the heart-throb from Ready Steady Cook) making a too-rich moussaka for Ann Widdecombe on UK Food's flagship show, Good Food Live. It was hard to tell who was the more craven, the chef or the politician. "I'll certainly be cooking this again!" lied Widdecombe, the notorious fan of low-fat ready meals, as she gamely stirred great twigs of herbs into the oily and unappetising meat sauce.
But if cable food shows can be the very worst of gastronomic TV, on occasion they can be close to the best. The same qualities that make so much cable TV dross - the cheap and quick production, the minimal editorial intervention - can be turned to virtues. Tamasin's Weekends is a series made for UK Food starring the black-maned Irish food writer Tamasin Day-Lewis, whose books I've already written about here. You could learn more about real home cooking from watching this show than from any number of glamorous cheffy vehicles.
The programme mainly takes place in Day-Lewis's own very undesigner kitchen with chipped enamel scales and a rickety old cooker, which makes a refreshing change from all those chrome studio kitchens. It was filmed in 15 parts over 16 days, which can't have left much time for retakes. Much of the action is shown more or less in real time, which can be quite boring and repetitive - but then, so is real cooking. There is no room for the luxury of "here's one I made earlier". When Day-Lewis anxiously cuts open a wobbling dish of baked pancakes stuffed with buffalo mozzarella, there is a touch of real suspense, because you feel she won't have time to make another one if it goes belly-up. She uses the same bottle of good Sicilian olive oil throughout the series - you can see the level go down.
Whereas more expensive food programmes often strain to create an illusion of domestic intimacy, here the intimacy feels real. One programme features a dinner party with Day-Lewis's friends where everyone visibly becomes blotto and fractious by the time the apricot bread-and-butter pudding arrives. When Day-Lewis's children appear, it is not as cute moppet props, but as gangly kitchen hands, who are nagged into fluffing up the potatoes for roasting and sticking the right number of cloves in the onion for bread sauce. Their intermittently bossy and sulky exchanges are a much better way of educating the viewer than the sterile and contrived conversations between chefs that you get on the BBC.
You also feel that there has been no time for executives to edit Day-Lewis into seeming more likeable or less like herself. "Ecco!" she barks, like E F Benson's Lucia, at the sight of porcini growing by a roadside. Without the jazzy music and fancy camera-work of terrestrial programmes, what shines through is Day-Lewis's earthy brand of food, which is allowed to speak for itself: real roast chicken with giblet gravy; blueberry genoise cake; an alluring pale-red Bloody Mary made with fresh tomatoes from the garden and horseradish root; scrambled eggs; baked-apple creme brulee.
With TV channels, as with food, more isn't always worse.
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