Heston’s Roman Feast Channel 4

I’ve been carefully avoiding Heston Blumenthal’s daft new series, in which he “re-creates” feasts of the past. I’d begun to associate it a little too strongly with the outbreak of vomiting that recently shut down his restaurant, the Fat Duck.

But then the Fat Duck reopened and I felt sufficiently unqueasy to tune in to the final show: Heston does Roman (24 March, 9pm).

My God. At first, I thought I was hallucinating. At table, waiting for Heston to deliver said delicacies, were six “celebrities”. Obviously. This goes without saying. Still, what celebrities they were! In the lippy Sue Perkins role (he even looks like Sue Perkins) was Danny Wallace, a comedian-writer person. Fine. I took him in my stride.

Then the cast list started to get really crazy. There was the Marquess of Bath, owner of Longleat, looking like a Glastonbury candle-maker, and doubtless smelling like one, too. There was Alexander Armstrong, the comedian and face of Pimm’s, who surely can’t need a gig like this, can he? I mean, he just turned down a job on Countdown. And, barmiest of all, there was Greta Scacchi, actor and all-round sex goddess. Oh, Greta. What are you doing? From White Mischief to this?

Lord Bath was particularly excited by the idea of Heston’s decadent dinner. And no wonder. I once interviewed the good marquess, and his kitchen shelves were stacked with jar upon jar of Chicken Tonight. Even calf’s brain custard is preferable to Chicken Tonight. Plus, as any reader of the Daily Mail knows, Lord Bath is a frisky so-and-so, much given to adopting “wifelets”. How pleasing, then, for him to find himself dining not only with Greta, but with a model, Lisa Butcher, too.

I wonder if he asked either of them back to Longleat for a private tour of the hedge maze and the model of Greendale, Postman Pat’s village.

But I digress. Let’s get back to Heston. Having perused a few old cookbooks (yeah, right), he’d come up with a menu: crisp pig’s nipples followed by the aforementioned custard; a main course of Trojan hog designed, like the horse, to hide a secret – in this case, exploding “intestines” which were actually sausages; and, to finish, a pudding that would “ejaculate” saffron custard. Needless to say, putting this menu on the table was going to involve lots of experiments and lots of foreign travel; it was, in fact, a huge and utterly pointless faff. Poor Heston, he works so hard at being wacky. Then along comes Lord Bath, in his voluminous purple velvet, and steals the bloody show. I bet that’s the last time he’s invited.

Things took a surreal turn when Heston went to Italy to learn traditional sausage-making skills. The butcher in question appeared to be psychotic. First, he serenaded Heston on a “trumpet” made of dried pigskin. Then he crowned him with a coronet of chop bones. Most people, at this point, would have said to their producer: “Look, I have three Michelin stars. There must be some bloke in Lancashire who can show me how to fill pig’s intestines with sausage meat.”

Not Heston: he does as he is told.

Back in Britain, he decided to cook his hog in a plastic bag in a garden hot tub; bubbling away, it was straight out of Fatal Attraction, only without any of that film’s drama or zeitgeisty sexual politics. In other words, it was just faintly repulsive. There was also lots of messing about with Coke bottles and Mintoes (put one inside the other, and you get an explosion). All these gimmicks, of course, had only

the most tangential connection to the food he eventually put on the table. He could, for instance, have spit-roasted his pig like any sane person – or at least, like any person who is cooking for a reason other than to please a Channel 4 commissioning editor. Honestly.

This kind of stuff drives me nuts. But, happily, our celebrities were not half so cynical as I am (or maybe they are just better paid). They seemed to love Heston’s food almost as much as they loved themselves. As for Lord Bath, boy, did he scoff. The poor old aristo.

I do hope Heston thought to give him a doggy bag.

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