Hints of a familiar recipe
IF ONLY the sisters from EATING WELL WITH HEMSLEY + HEMSLEY (C4) were cooks. They are, of course, but since it’s a pair of cooks on a cooking show made in 2016, they’ve got to be so much more besides.
“This is a peek into our world,” they said at the beginning of the programme, a phrase making my heart sink like a mistimed soufflé.
At the start of the millennium, Jamie Oliver gave us lots of peeks into his world. All the “mates” who looked like they’d been hired in, the VW camper van, the new lad lifestyle complete with the jargon, surfboard and scooter. The Hemsley sisters are being dished up as the new equivalent.
Their world is one in which they float, fresh as daisies, around artisan food markets. The mates are stallholders and café owners in the vanguard of the food revolution; the sort of people who’ll charge a tenner for a loaf and not blink.
But instead of plying your muckers with some scran, as Jamie might have done, the emphasis is on that dubious term “wellness” and everything being healthily gluten-free.
The intention perhaps is to say that you can have all those things and still have fun but the events on-screen often suggest otherwise.
At one point, they spoke about melted cheese as if it was the equivalent of three stiff bourbons. Later, in a cutesy coffee shop, much show was made of them not finishing a piece of cake because they’d had all they needed.
You longed for the ghost of Keith Floyd to appear as a poltergeist in their kitchen and start chucking biodynamic eggs around, whatever they are.
The thing is, the food looks great. I draw the line at pretending you can disguise a ribbon of raw courgette as spaghetti but the rest of it was fresh, colourful and utterly unpretentious.
The Hemsleys’ world of course isn’t a world, it’s the way they are packaged and sold. Like a lot of modern packaging, it gets in the way of the food.
In the year of pondering and arguing that preceded my household acquiring a miniature schnauzer, many people reminded us that he wouldn’t be a puppy for very long.
They said it more than once on CHOOSE THE RIGHT PUPPY FOR YOU (BBC2), which makes you wonder why they gave it that particular title.
People tune into puppies, I guess, in the way they don’t for dogs and as someone whose fussed-over puppy became just another dog overnight, believe me, that hurts.
I hadn’t expected it and, as this two-parter faithfully demonstrated, acquiring a dog is full of things you don’t expect. That’s why the animal refuges are full and why parks are full of people afraid of badly trained muts.
Packed with solid advice as it was, the main pull of the show was, of course, given away by the title. Endless, impossibly cute puppies, charming their way into human lives.
The pick of the bunch perhaps was Ray the cavapoo. As the long-suffering single dad to three girls, Frank was determined not to make an impulse decision or crumble in the face of sustained pestering. When Ray came home, the girls were told to let him settle and stop picking him up.
The last we saw of him was this tiny ball of gold in the centre of a worshipful circle of girls, all sitting on their hands. A great picture and that’s what TV is all about.