My big beef with Torode
THERE was a TV colleague of mine who had a nifty line in annoying phrases. At our story- planning meetings, where we’d pitch our ideas to the EastEnders production team, he’d sit with arms folded. “What’s the vis?” he’d ask. “Show me the vis!”
Appalling as he was, he had a point. TV is all about the “vis”, or the visual, what viewers see on their screens.
To give you an example from the soap world, storylines about adult literacy offer little of that much- prized “vis”. Even though they’re tackling important issues and even though most of the soaps attempt to run one every few years, they just end up as endless scenes of someone staring at a book.
It’s just as important at the factual end, as last night’s episode of A COOK ABROAD ( BBC2) showed. Tony Singh’s tour of the Punjab in northern India set the bar pretty high. By contrast, John Torode’s Argentine trip was a resounding belly- flop.
The MasterChef judge is a renowned chef and a fine writer but he’s not the most sizzling of screen presences.
He wasn’t helped by the subject matter, either, which was beef, beef and, er, more beef.
Now, beef is the pumping heart of Argentina, of course. Its citizens eat car- loads of the stuff every year. The flat, grassy plains of the pampas were considered ideal for cattlerearing and it was British settlers who first got it going with the Aberdeen Angus and Hereford breeds still prominent today.
Around all the cattle there’s a culture, not just of eating great slabs of beef, but of the mate- sipping gaucho cowboys, the colonial estancias and a whole, rugged way of life.
Unfortunately, especially if you’re doing a programme about the food end of this culture, your main visual material is going to be beef. Raw or cooked, it doesn’t look as good as a curry or a salad. Nor do the Argentinian pampas look that great either. The once- green plains have mostly been turned sludge brown by intensive soya farming and even at its best, the land named for its silver mines resembles a very large, very empty version of Lincolnshire.
Someone must have sensed how boring things were because at regular intervals Torode kept making awkward speeches about how amazing it all was.
I sensed there might have been a cattle prod up his back as he enthused, “This whole country is crazy! The main road, it’s a thousand kilometres long, and then you turn up, and there’s a guy baking bread at the side of the road! I’ve had lunch in a place I never even knew existed! And now I’m going to buy some bread!” Stop me if this sounds too exciting, I was myself by this point in a kind of beef- induced coma.
The remaining contestants on 10,000 BC ( Channel 5) would probably have killed for a burger. In fact, they probably didn’t have to because snow on the tree branches around their Mesolithic camp site forced an emergency evacuation.
They then spent a week in a nice cosy hotel, apparently waiting for the weather to improve. I’m sure this was all true, I’m sure I wouldn’t have lasted beyond day two.
I’m equally sure a 1970s version of this TV experiment would have left them out there in the snow and not intervened every five minutes in a fit of health and safety paranoia.
If it’s an experiment, it’s an experiment. If it’s a gameshow, I’m not that bothered.