Jamie Oliver’s new show will lure you into the kitchen What to watch
Even when our TV screens are bloated to the point of bursting with culinary shows, a new series by Jamie Oliver has got to be worth a look. Jamie’s Quick and Easy Food (Channel 4) promised a panacea for our hectic modern lives – gloriously flavoursome food that can be conjured up in minutes.
“After all these years, I’ve come up with a new way of cooking that has changed my life, and it’s going to take the stress out of yours, too,” enthused Oliver, with a messianic sense of transformational possibility.
So it feels almost curmudgeonly to point out that he’s been plying this fast-and-simple line since 2010 when he made the series Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals and followed it with the still more parsimonious Jamie’s 15 Minute Meals in 2012. Even The Naked Chef, with which he made his name back in the 20th century, kicked off with the line: “It’s got to be simple, it’s got to be tasty, it’s got to be fun.”
Still, we love him for it (and his terrific campaigns) and anyone who’s ever looked down a long list of cookbook ingredients and groaned will have wanted to run out and hug him for coming up with something genuinely useful and novel this time round – dishes that only use five ingredients.
His opening foray was a typically alliterative “superfast sizzly scallops with black pudding and smashed-up spuds”, to which were added mint and peas for a mouth-watering quick-fix meal. Let’s hope the shops have been warned to stock up on scallops for the next few days as we can expect a run on them.
Natural yogurt and self-raising flour were the basics utilised for the six-minute flatbreads he baked next for his egg, mango chutney and chilli “supersnack with attitude”. Who knew you could make bread so swiftly? There was an “epic” rib-eye steak, mushroom and cannellini bean dish to follow, and an almond pasty puff to bring down the curtain on a show packed with the type of showmanship and useful professional tips that are Oliver’s stock in trade.
There was something else too: a sense that these five-ingredient recipes really were quick and easy – and a corresponding urge to give them a try. For once, the lure of the kitchen felt as strong as that of the television.
Surely the first rule of therapy is that it is confidential, a safe space to delve deep. And not a spectator sport. So one comes to a show like Paul Burrell: In Therapy (Channel 5) with scepticism from the outset.
Still, Anthony Clare’s In the Psychiatrist’s Chair on Radio 4 was one of the most electrifying interview series ever made. The question here was whether therapist Mandy Saligari’s encounter with Paul Burrell, Diana, Princess of Wales’s former butler and not-so-confidante, could prove half as compelling.
Burrell had three issues he wanted to explore: “The passing of the Princess, my sexuality, and why I was so vilified in the media.”
The last one was the easiest. “Part of it might be that on Diana’s death you sold out,” noted Saligari. Slam dunk. No need to investigate that one any further.
Burrell’s sexuality and relationship with Diana proved more productive veins to tap, quickly bringing to the surface a personality trait that Saligari summed up as: “All is not as it seems with him. He has learnt to perform, to play a role.”
If there was a grim fascination in watching Saligari skilfully unpack what was not real (or “constructed” as she put it) in Burrell’s personality, more often than not we viewers were simply left guessing whether what came out of his mouth was true or, at best, delusional.
Did the Queen really “advise” Burrell to marry his now ex-wife when his affair with a male crew member of the Royal yacht came to light. (“I felt like I was being manoeuvred,” he said, as if the decision had not been his own.) Was he really “top of the list” of what Diana wanted to keep when her marriage split up? One could be forgiven for questioning it.
No doubt Burrell’s sexuality has been a struggle, and that he was deeply traumatised by Diana, Princess of Wales’s death. One must be sympathetic to this, but why, beyond a compulsion to be in the public eye, would he want to dredge it up and pick over it on television, of all places? That’s the point at which, for some of us, motives get questioned and the impulse to sympathise dries up.
Jamie’s Quick and Easy Food Paul Burrell: In Therapy