Fowl language suits chefs
I’M A huge fan of roast pork or rather, I was until I spent consecutive Chinese new years in the Far East and was forced to eat enough of the stuff to choke the People’s Liberation Army. I wonder if, while trotting the globe for THE HAIRY BIKERS’ CHICKEN AND EGG (BBC2), Dave and Si came to feel the same about poultry. They don’t give that impression but at the same time, different segments of their journey seem to sit better than others.
These hefty, hairy lads from the north obviously love food but they didn’t seem convincing with the Michelin-star elitists of Paris.
By the same token, they absolutely looked the part in last night’s episode which had them down in America’s Deep South, sampling grits and gravy and the sometimes troubled history of tucker in a two-tier state. More and more chicken is being eaten, year on year but in Dixieland it’s always been a staple.
A chicken was the only form of livestock a slave was permitted to own and after abolition, it remained the ultimate, portable life-support system. So much fried chicken was eaten on the railway line transporting poor black people to the industrial cities of the north that it became known as the “chicken bone express”.
Food and migration seemed to go together like ham and mustard in last night’s historical meanderings which also took in the origins of the classic American diner. The “chuck wagon” fed cowboys on the move and later came to the cities as a symbol of how the West was won.
They’ve lost their wheels but many diners still have the air of a vehicle waiting to move on. “History on a plate” as the lads said. That might have been a better title for the series and given them a more varied diet.
In the early Eighties, television schedules were stuffed with gritty dramas about children’s homes, psychiatric institutions and tough comprehensives and we always watched them, even though my dad complained.
“These places wouldn’t be in such a state,” he’d grouse, “if all the people who worked there stayed working there and didn’t slope off to write screenplays.”
He had a point, certainly about the volume of such programmes, if not the quality. People might feel the same about the latest comedy from Jo Brand and Morwenna Banks, DAMNED (C4).
Brand, a former psychiatric nurse, has mined her experiences for comedy gold, writing and starring in interlinked BBC gems Getting On and Going Forward.
I’m not sure Damned, set in the children’s services department of some benighted urban borough, has much to add. There are more classic sitcom touches, such as phones that don’t work and a social worker who still thinks he’s in the police. It even boasts the lovely Alan Davies as the everyman but ultimately it just feels like Jo Brand in a new job.
As with her previous comedies, this one doesn’t shy away from the shabby realities, last night’s story bringing her into the orbit of a former lover, now shacked up with an oxygen tank and half a dozen grandkids that his heroin addict daughter can’t care for.
Moving, clever stuff tempered with a hefty dash of cynicism and swearing and featuring, as always, a main character who doesn’t give a stuff for the rules but does give a stuff about people.
The curse of Damned is that it’s all been done already.