Be quiet, Hugh! That’s the one F-word you CAN’T say on telly
Don’t mention the ‘F’ word. the fourletter one is all right — you hear it unbleeped so often on telly now that it can’t be long before we have a contest to find the nation’s sweariest grandmother, in the Great British F*** off.
the ‘ F’ word you can’t say out loud formed part of the title of
Britain’s Fat Fight (BBC1). Celebrity chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall lobbed it into the conversation at a meeting of newcastle city councillors, and the whole room turned a shade paler, as blood drained from faces.
‘ Saying “fat”,’ whispered one aghast civic servant, ‘ has connotations of . . . blame.’
Blame is a forbidden concept now. A third of British children are overweight, as are two-thirds of adults, but Heaven forbid that anyone should suggest that we are personally responsible for what we put in our faces.
‘obesity’ is another term the councillors didn’t want to hear. And ‘diet’ was frowned upon — it has such negative connotations. they wanted Hugh to launch a campaign for better health, but they couldn’t risk hurting the feelings of any voters.
In the end, they adapted one of Barack obama’s meaningless slogans, and declared, ‘newcastle
SNEEZE OF THE NIGHT: Dickie the amorous okapi was snorting and snuffling in The Secret Life Of the Zoo (C4). It sounded like he was clearing his sinuses, but that’s the lovesong of the forest giraffe: ‘When I’m calling you, ach-oo-ooo, ach-oo-ooo . . .’
Can!’ — oblivious to the irony that ‘ newcastle can’ sounds like a cheap, sugary ale in a supermarket four-pack.
Hugh and tV doctor Giles Yeo, neither of whom could be described as snake- hipped and willowy, were concerned that obesity treatment on the nHS now costs the taxpayer more than we spend on the courts and emergency services. Brits, said Giles, are Europe’s biggest snackers.
But if we’re not personally to blame, whose fault is it? Hugh turned on the big corporations, badgering cereal manufacturers nestle and Kellogg’s for failing to highlight the amount of suga r crammed into their breakfast bowls.
Mind you, the names ought to be a giveaway — ‘Sugar Puffs’ and ‘Coco Pops’ don’t exactly sound like health foods.
Hugh also took a vegetable stall out on to the city estates and tried to sell leeks and potatoes at rock bottom prices. this made him unpopular with local shopkeepers but, to give Hugh his due, he is an unfailingly polite man who can disarm anyone with his impeccable charm.
Very cleverly and subtly, that’s what he was doing to us, the viewers.
He was far too polite to say it bluntly, but by pretending to chastise the food giants, he was really addressing the general public: if we want to lose weight, it’s up to us. the multinationals won’t help. And please, no, he wouldn’t dream of calling us fat.
the gags in Benidorm (ItV) about fat folk are not quite so subtle. one of the rib-ticklers of the episode featured a big girl dipping her toe in the swimming pool, losing her balance and toppling in with a squeal.
that was it — a fat lass falling in the water. Benidorm’s humour has always been coarse and broad, but now it’s plain lazy, too. no wonder the plots have got flabby.
It was left to tony Maudsley as Kenneth the hairdresser to carry this tail- end edition of the comedy. Most of the funnier characters have either gone home, such as those played by Shane Richie, and Hale and Pace, or simply aren’t in this series, like Johnny Vegas’s Geoff.
Kenneth was bricked up inside his salon, gradually going mad with only a polystyrene head for company. Surely no one has ever been walled up alive in a Benidorm hotel — it takes the builders a fortnight to finish one row of breezeblocks.