Pineapples sexy? Only if you’re a very shortsighted porcupine
WHAT happened to Carmen Miranda? She was the Lady In The Tutti Frutti Hat, the Latin-American dynamo who shook her hips to the samba while throwing fruity winks at the camera.
Barely five feet tall, she was the darling of Rio de Janeiro’s 1920s nightclub scene in her teens, before becoming a Hollywood star, nicknamed the Brazilian Bombshell — famous for wearing a headdress made from a whole pineapple.
Shockingly, she was dead aged 46: after a wild party, she retired to her ensuite bedroom, lit a cigarette at the bathroom mirror and was felled by a cardiac arrest. Her husband found her the next morning.
No one since Carmen has ever made a pineapple sexy. But Dr Xand van Tulleken was prepared to try, in How To Lose Weight Well: Summer Special (C4).
He recommended a fad known as the ‘ sexy pineapple diet’, which consisted of grilled pineapple washed down by a pineapple smoothie, twice a day — and nothing else. Do this three times weekly, and the weight will fall off, he promised.
Dieter Zoe gave it a go and lost more than half a stone in a week. Her success was slightly marred by the stern medical warning, no doubt inserted at the insistence of Channel 4’s lawyers: crash diets are dangerous, you’ll put the weight back on, don’t try this at home. They might have added that pineapples will never be sexy, except perhaps to a shortsighted porcupine.
Some of the show’s other health tips were downright revolting. A slice of conger eel boosts the body with as much vitamin D as 20 minutes of sunbathing. Six boiled snails contain your daily quota of magnesium.
And why bother with a glass of milk? Crunching on whole fried whitebait, heads and bones and all, supplies all the calcium you need.
If the idea of this one- off programme was to help us get slim by spoiling our appetites, it succeeded.
Perhaps the only genuinely useful tip in the whole hour was a suggestion for tasty salads: the blandest lettuce leaf will become delicious if it’s drizzled in olive oil.
Don’t use Cuban olive oil from the revolutionary Castro era though, or you might find your greens are exploding . . . and not with flavour. The documentary Cuba: Castro vs The World (BBC2) revealed the Caribbean dictator fomented armed uprisings around the world by sending guns to freedom fighters . . . smuggled in barrels of olive oil.
This brisk history of Communist Cuba’s international role should have been more interesting than it managed to be. Former guerillas, diplomats and political insiders explained how Castro was determined his small nation would exert worldwide influence.
If he’d decided to do this by spreading the island’s magical culture, its fabulous food and mesmerising music, he might have triumphed. Instead, he opted to promote socialism from Venezuela to Angola. All he did was create misery.
The programme echoed his error. It conveyed none of Cuba’s real character. The ominous soundtrack was orchestral, when it could have used the island’s indigenous jazz known as ‘son cubano’. Above all, it failed to explain Castro’s charismatic appeal. This man dragged his native country into a protracted war, wrecking the economy and plunging families into poverty.
Yet many older Cubans still speak of El Comandante with reverence. A documentary that showed us why they loved him would have been better than this dry lecture.