My goodness Jamie, what a silly sausage
NICE JAMIE Oliver. He’s not everyone’s cup of tea but he can always be relied upon for a surprise. Things have moved on from the days when he simply flailed herbs around his kitchen in the name of flavour. Indeed, he may have invented a new genre – comedy cuisine. Jamie: Keep Cooking Family Favourites ( C4, Monday) – the most boggling title ever for a food show – challenged the nation’s delicate palate with recipes that would have made Fanny Craddock take on the Naked Chef with a rolling pin while Johnny cheered from the sidelines.
Let’s face it, Jamie has form. He once told Americans that sugar was bad for them, creating at a stroke one of TV’S great tumbleweed moments. He also rather breathlessly told us that Turkey Twizzlers were ruining our kids’ health. Never. This time though, he was just plain barmy.
In the first recipe, he stuffed a Cumberland sausage under the skin of a roast chicken. What’s a Cumberland sausage, a proud specimen on its own, ever done to deserve that?! He didn’t even leave the skin on the sausage either. After all the trouble someone went to in the first place.
If life is too short to stuff a mushroom, no one can be bothered to tackle this delicate operation with a spatula. You would need the steady hands of a Harley Street plastic surgeon. And what an insult to anyone ever associated with Cumbria. I expect protests outside Jamie’s Italian frankly – if you can find one.
His next trick was reworking Bolognese to make it “British”. His original Italian mentor Gennaro Contaldo, or indeed anyone with an Italian name, must have watched in horror. This amounted to using beer – pale ale – rather than wine and sprinkling cheddar cheese over the finished meal rather than Parmesan. I know we’ve come out of Europe, but this is ridiculous. He said it made it taste “meaty”. It’s beef mince!
For some reason, he even used a bag of pre-prepared diced vegetables. Jamie, chopping vegetables is all we have left now in the “new normal”. But at least he can be relied on for one thing: his catchphrases never die. As he approached the trembling chicken with a handful of sage, he said with relish: “Stick some up its Jacksie!” So roll on next week. He’s making pasta out of cauliflower. A nation scratches its head.
This was not the only show to feature sausage meat. It really was the week for a vegan to take a holiday. There was not even a warning broadcast for such frail species before
Call That Hard Work?
( BBC One, Monday). As a TV critic I’m a little reluctant to criticise any show that goes by this title, but you should try watching reality shows nowadays. Between them, the Kardashians and Gemma Collins have taken all the fun out of it.
The first episode featured a sausage maker, a head gardener and a bingo caller. And no, they didn’t all walk into a pub... The winner actually got £1,000 – although as the show concluded I wasn’t sure whether the victor was actually the loser. Still, it’s job satisfaction that counts even if your fellow contestants might think you’re
a mug for working so hard. They each try each others’ jobs while the person who does it for real gives them incredibly difficult things to do that they would never consider doing themselves. So head gardener Dan had his two victims plant up a bed with dozens of bedding plants in half an hour after already digging in some manure and trailing a full wheelbarrow for an hour. His charges were shattered and voted accordingly.
Lovecraft Country ( Sky Atlantic, Monday) was utterly boggling but equally enthralling. We began by seeing a black man, Atticus Black, returning from the Korean War but alas encountering the same dreadful segregated country that he had left behind. He teamed up with his uncle and an old friend to find his missing father in a road trip across the States.
So far, so clear. Unfamiliar with the horror fiction of author HP Lovecraft, I was then surprised to see racist state troopers turn into the “vampires” and/or nasty looking monsters whom you most definitely would not engage with over a speeding ticket.
They would take a bullet, however, which was satisfying for our fighting trio who were dismayed when one of the said troopers continued to thrive even though his arm had been eaten off. He was, in fact, transitioning. At least by the episode’s end, our heroes had also discovered that the monsters didn’t like light – or a subtle discourse about prevalent race issues.
As a brutal expression of Southern racism in Fifties’ America, it was as bleak and as savage as you could ever get. But our three travellers are still alive, so hope prevails. Do not watch shortly before bedtime – and never follow this trio into a diner.