Squid, chocolate, gin ... the flavours that prove we really are crisp crazy

Britain has become a nation of terminally pretentious foodies. We’re so obsessed with fancy flavours and artisan posturing that, as Secrets Of Our Favourite Snacks (C4) proved, we’ll bankrupt ourselves for a packet of crisps — and swank about it afterwards.

at the country’s first ‘crisp and dip restaurant’, HipChips in Soho, customers pay up to £11 for a handful of fried potato slices and a blob of sauce. Choose among beetroot and lemongrass with marmalade flavour, katsu curry or chocolate salty caramel.

Eleven quid will still buy you a round of drinks or fish ’n’ chips for two in most parts of the country.

anyone who wants to pay that much to dip a packet of crisps in chocolate goo should be locked up for their own safety.

But the madness isn’t confined to Soho hipsters. Supermarket brands are developing flavours whose mere names could inspire you to fast for a week. Fancy a bag of fermented squid, or aged Cheddar with horseradish? Why ever not?

Presenter and chef Simon rimmer was guilty of encouraging these excesses when he sat in on a tasting session, and proclaimed himself ecstatic at the ‘mouthfeel’ of a new York pastrami sandwich crisp with dill pickle flavouring. But if the snacks were irritatingly self-indulgent, the show was not.

Full of moreish snippets, this oneoff special casually revealed that the average crisp-lover consumes five litres of cooking oil a year . . . and the inventor of the Pringles tube had his ashes sealed and buried in his trademark cylinder.

Simon and co-presenter Sophie Morgan also managed to cram in an entertaining history of telly ads for crisps, as well as a survey that proved we Brits are not only getting more pretentious . . . we’re increasingly greedy, too.

Our addiction to oil-fried, salty treats has soared in the past five years, with brain scans proving that a bag of salt-and-vinegar hits the same pleasure nodes as alcohol and cocaine. So that’s what Gary Lineker is grinning about in those Walkers adverts.

Keen to capture the boozy nibblers, one manufacturer offers gin-and-tonic flavoured popcorn doused in real gin. Small wonder that the show’s nationwide survey of snackers showed popcorn consumption is up 50 per cent in two years, thanks mostly to women between 25 and 44. Mums and gin: that combination can’t fail.

With his bald bonce wrapped pointlessly under a blue hairnet for factory visits, Simon is a dead ringer for Gregg Wallace — who has also presented shows about crisps and how they are made, on BBC2’s inside the Factory.

it’s easy to tell them apart — unlike Gregg, Simon doesn’t do whoops of ‘Wow! amazing!’ that made everything more palatable, even the gin-and-tonic popcorn.

Doubles and doppelgangers were a theme for the evening, as Kyle MacLachlan played both agent Dale Cooper and his evil twin in Twin Peaks: The Return (Sky atlantic). this nineties cult classic is back with much of the original cast and the same haunting theme song.

Fans from the first era will remember that what began as a brilliantly eerie murder mystery became a heap of supernatural hooey. Sadly, that’s what director David Lynch has revived.

agent Cooper spent much of the episode wandering through corridors of red curtains. a monster materialised in a glass box and ripped two young lovers to shreds. then a decomposing head turned up in bed on someone else’s body, and Evil agent Cooper killed some women.

Cue more haunting theme music. What on earth was all that about?