Your 7-day guide to what’s on
Jamie and Jimmy’s Friday Night Feast (Channel 4, 8pm)
JAMIE Oliver and Jimmy Doherty – it would be rather fitting to describe them as two peas in a pod, or at the very least, two sides of the same coin.
The best pals have known each other since they were knee-high to a grasshopper, so their bonhomie is genuine, rather than the cringeworthy forced kind we so often see on TV between people who hardly knew each other before the cameras began to roll.
They’ve been working together on Jamie and Jimmy’s Friday Night Feast since 2014, and it seems to be the perfect format for their talents.
They were born three days apart (Oliver is the younger) and grew up together in the rural Essex village of Clavering, where Oliver’s parents ran the local pub, The Cricketers; it was here that he first cut his teeth as a chef, practicing his cookery skills in its restaurant alongside his mum and dad.
From there, Oliver worked for Antonio Carluccio before moving to The River Cafe, where he was famous spotted by the BBC who were making a documentary on the premises. That was in 1997 and two years later, he was fronting his own show, The Naked Chef, which won him millions of fans who also snapped up the tie-in book.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Like Oliver, Doherty never expected to have a TV career, and while his hasn’t given him quite as high as profile as his friend, it’s still made him a famous face. He is a farmer by trade whose work was charted by the BBC in fly-on-the-wall series Jimmy’s Farm; he now works exclusively for Channel 4, most notably on Food Unwrapped.
Now they’re back together, side by side behind the counter of their little cafe on Southend Pier as the show returns for its sixth series. Hopefully it won’t destroy your enjoyment of the programme to learn that the cafe isn’t real – it only opens for about a fortnight every year for filming purposes, and the ‘customers’ are members of the public who have applied to pose as diners.
However, the guests are very real and the run begins with one who is simply out of this world – Jodie Whittaker, left, currently wowing the nation as the 13th Time Lord in Doctor Who.
Although the eaterie isn’t anywhere near as large as the interior of her Tardis (it’s certainly not bigger on the inside than it is on the outside), she gets set for a cooking lesson more adventurous than her journeys through time and space.
Whittaker helps the boys prepare roast pork with a double helping of crispy crackling and tucks into a Thai beef massaman curry she’s been dreaming about since she was 18.
Oliver and Doherty also head out onto the road, launching a campaign to keep sustainable British brown crabs on the menus of restaurants across the country, while Doherty also spends time building a barbecue for the Harlequins ladies rugby team.