Gregg’s all too obvious
MY dad, cynic that he is, had a special name for Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected. He called them Tales of the Entirely Expected, which I must add, didn’t stop him owning the books and watching the TV adaptations.
It’s similar with SUPERMARKET SHOPPING SECRETS (BBC1), every episode of which features Gregg Wallace going “behind the scenes” of our supermarkets. You can, of course, bet your last packet of Monster Munch that if anyone is letting Gregg and a camera crew behind their scenes, then they aren’t letting him in on any secrets.
Whether that matters is another point. My dad and perhaps a lot of other viewers enjoyed those twisty tales of Roald Dahl precisely because they thought they were very clever by guessing the ending. Last night’s show was similarly satisfying, in that it confirmed a lot of things we’d long suspected.
I was at college and virtually living on peanut butter when I first noticed that the taste of the stuff had changed and somehow become bleaker. Decades on, however, I can’t remember what the old version tasted like. Gregg put this to the test with two bowls of cornflakes, one from 1998 (or, I assume, made according to 1998’s recipe, rather than actually being 19 years old), and one from modern times. There were 14 grammes of salt in the original flakes and only four now, which is better for us all, of course, but still a bit of a liberty.
Supermarkets are at it all the time, the programme confirmed, but they do it gradually so that people don’t notice.
More to the point, they probably do notice, but they either think they’re mistaken, or they haven’t got the time to complain about it, and eventually they just get used to it anyway.
It is, as other features on last night’s show demonstrated, a fine line between bamboozling and encouraging and a good example comes from the packaging and labelling of “healthy” food. There are no regulations on calling things “natural” or “good”. Even terms like “a source of” and “high in”, which are regulated, can easily be misunderstood by punters.
Meanwhile, despite the enormous amount of skill and expertise and development funds being sunk by supermarkets into knocking out healthy alternatives, the one thing we all already knew kept repeating like a garlicky belch. The glutenfree, dairy-free lasagne was described as a “good effort” but it just wasn’t as nice as the real one.
Same for the low-alcohol vino, which was “not bad” but not as good as the real thing. You can’t have your cake and eat it.
Three episodes in, and it still feels as if those party political archive shots at the start of FEARLESS (ITV) are trying to give it a weight it doesn’t quite have. It will not, I suspect, be remembered in the same way as other big political conspiracy dramas like State Of Play and Edge Of Darkness.
They’re not telling us what ace lawyer Emma Banville’s (Helen McCrory) flashbacks are about – her trips to see her dying dad, the bickering with her waspish mum are one scene, repeated endlessly.
The more danger in which she puts herself and those whom she allegedly loves, the more we wonder if she’s driven by justice or just a massive ego.
That said, as spooks and cops and lynch mobs and terrorists circle and swoop on the lawyer’s life like vultures, it is, undoubtedly, breathtakingly good TV.