Cheesed off with format
IN THE Eighties, if you’d told someone your ambition was to bake bread or make cheese, they’d have smiled and backed away. The pie man once wanted to be an investment banker, now the investment banker dreams of flogging artisan pies.
That might have something to do with the cost of artisan pies, some of which, gram for gram, probably haul in more profit than a City stockbroker.
The same goes for cheeses, one of which was being offered on TOP OF THE SHOP WITH TOM KERRIDGE (BBC2) for £6 per 100g. The difficulty for the small cheesemaker, we discovered, is often how to put the hours in. Science lecturer Gillian, competing with other fledgling cheese moguls in a real-life farm shop setting, could only spare time to make 80 of her simple, unpasteurised goats’ cheeses a week.
If she could make more, she could charge less but she could only make more by giving up the day job. She was not alone among last night’s bunch in having an all-consuming passion for her product.
Much as I wanted to scoff at people doing artisan food as a faddy modern hobby, this wasn’t the case here. They all had a calling and the calling was cheese.
Actually, in the case of Pedro and his smoked paprika goats’ cheese, the calling might have been Rosie, his only goat. I worried about this relationship, not because it was unhealthy for a man to love a goat but because it seemed risky for a business to depend on one.
What would happen if Rosie fell ill or, heaven forbid, got lured away by Dairylea? At least I cared although at times this four-part series presented by chef Tom Kerridge shares qualities with a cheese soufflé.
There’s not that much there, certainly not enough for hour-long programmes which is why the contestants have to jump through pointless hoops. Having tried to sell their wares at the farm shop in Malhamdale and had feedback, they were ordered to return. This time they had to cook their cheeses into tempting delicacies and were marked on the results as if this was a dairy-based MasterChef.
To string things out further, Tom made a habit of befriending customers in the shop then inviting himself along to whatever it was they were doing next.
He ended up following two local climbers up a crag, the only link being that they had cheese sandwiches in their knapsacks. In the same way as crackers, pickles and fig jam are unnecessary with a good, strong Stilton, a good, strong, half-hour TV format was cluttered. This could Brie a Gouda series but it needs editing, Caerphilly (sorry).
The penultimate episode of THE ASSASSINATION OF GIANNI VERSACE: AMERICAN CRIME STORY (BBC2) delved into the childhoods of killer Andrew Cunanan and his most famous victim. There wasn’t much of fashion legend Versace, to be fair, other than his fondness for sketching dresses when he was supposed to be learning Latin and the supportive role of his mum.
It was enough though to contrast with Cunanan (Darren Criss), creepily doted on by a controlling father whose success was built on lies.
The eighth episode of this drama penned by Tom Rob Smith was perhaps the most upsetting because it showed how, at one point, the narcissist killer could have gone another way. He could have had a mum like Versace’s instead of a dad like his.