Take a celebrity chef, a One Show reject and bingo! Primetime turkey
CHRISTOPHER STEVENS
Easy Ways To Live Well HIIII The Great Pottery Throw Down HHHII
YOU must have played this game. Take the name of your first pet and add it to the model of your first car to discover the pseudonym you’d use in, umm . . . adult movies. Your porn star name.
I’m Goldie Allegro, which is all right. My wife is Rosie Midget, which is frankly weird. Whatever your pet was called, bad luck if your first car was an Escort.
Auntie Beeb must be playing a variation that goes: take the first celebrity chef you think of and combine with the nearest available One Show reject. Shove them together into the blandest format possible and bingo! That’s your latest primetime turkey.
There’s no other explanation for the thinking that gave us Gregg Wallace and Chris Bavin in Eat Well For less? Or Monica Galetti and Giles Coren in Amazing Hotels.
now the random name game has delivered its strangest hybrid, by putting posh cook Hugh FearnleyWhittingstall and brash Teesside TV presenter Steph McGovern together to test health fads.
At various meetings in Broadcasting House, execs must have been enthusing about the ‘chemistry’ and ‘on-screen energy’ those two would create, which goes to prove that BBC commissioning editors know nothing about telly. They’re
Mark Addy, as DS Stan Jones in White House Farm (ITV), played Sherlock for one incongruous scene. His blitz of deductions about eight bullets and the order they were fired felt forced. It belonged in a different story. just guessing. Since the bosses are clueless, and the presenters haven’t been picked for any particular expertise, you wouldn’t expect any insights or useful information from Easy Ways To Live Well (BBC1). And you’d be right. It’s pointless.
Declaring her intention to tackle Britain’s growing opioid crisis, Steph urged employees at a garden centre on the Wirral to cure their backaches by forming a choir to sing pop standards.
Hugh set out to prove he could improve his memory by knitting a baby blanket, and spent eight weeks inspiring three children to eat more greens by using Brussels sprouts as ping-pong balls and broccoli as paintbrushes.
The duo claimed success for all these alternative methods. Of course they did: shows like these never conclude: ‘After filming was over, nobody reported any noticeable benefits, so it was a complete waste of time.’
Except . . . Steph took up belly dancing to improve her blood pressure and heart rate. At the end of the course, there were ‘no significant changes’ in her cardiovascular fitness. Even this was claimed as a resounding success. Steph was pregnant, you see. We can only guess at the awful state she’d be in without the belly dancing.
It was all nonsense. Even the soundtrack defied explanation. I noticed Billie Holiday singing When You’re Smiling, nick Drake’s Cello Song and the theme from Midnight Cowboy for being a little spikier too. Judge Keith Brymer Jones inspected one effort and said: ‘It looks like a plastic bottle that’s melted.’ new host Melanie Sykes told a potter who was trying to mould a clay dahlia: ‘It’s kind of like an artichoke.’
The blindfold test was fun, with contestants trying to throw a bowl on the whirling wheel with their eyes shut. But there’s still too much emphasis on laboured double entendres and lumps of sloppy clay plopping to the floor.
Inevitably there were tears, with one potter paying tribute to her late granny. Really, any contestant on these shows who so much as mentions a grandparent should be disqualified.