Too much like a corporate video? I should cocoa
‘Everyone’s a Fruit and Nut case.” “A finger of Fudge is just enough to give your kids a treat.” “Nuts! Whole hazelnuts.” “Only the crumbliest, flakiest chocolate.” “And all because the lady loves…” Cadbury’s slogans seemed to soundtrack all our yesterdays, so revisiting its vintage adverts on Secrets of the Chocolate Factory: Inside Cadbury (Channel 5) prompted a Proustian rush back to childhood. And made me distinctly peckish.
This documentary went behind the scenes to trace the confectionery giant’s 194-year history, telling how a modest family cocoa business in Birmingham evolved into one of our most successful exports.
This £12bn company makes a staggering 350 tonnes of chocolate each day but it started out as far more than just a factory. Determined to create a workers’ utopia, Quaker founder John Cadbury built the Bournville estate, a model village designed to improve Victorian living conditions. He succeeded in his socially responsible aims: the community’s children grew up on average 2in taller and 9lb heavier than those in inner-city slums.
We saw how the magical recipe for Dairy Milk took 15 years to perfect, how the brand’s ad campaigns capitalised on the TV age, how its signature purple has its own Pantone colour reference and how Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory books were inspired by the author’s stint as a schoolboy chocolate-taster. We met Flake girl Janis Levy and Milk Tray man James Coombes, who described his role as “the next best thing to being James Bond”.
It wasn’t all sweetness and lait. The company was rocked by two scandals during the Noughties, with a costly, reputation-damaging salmonella scare and a hostile takeover by Kraft Foods. However, it weathered the storms, thanks to its beloved products, canny marketing and a drumming gorilla.
Unfortunately, this film frequently felt like a corporate video. A pottedhistory puff-piece with insufficient analysis or critical thinking. A rosetinted hagiography with no mention of contemporary challenges such as Brexit, veganism or the obesity crisis. It lacked charismatic talking heads and colourful anecdotes. The visuals leaned too heavily on archive stills and the voice-over script was wearyingly repetitive. If we heard Willy Wonka comparisons or the phrase “bastion of Britishness” once, we heard them a dozen times.
Forget about Cadbury’s famous phrase “a glass and a half of fresh milk”. This documentary needed a blast and a half of journalistic rigour.
France might be more renowned for gastronauts than astronauts but Gallic space drama Missions (BBC Four), about the first manned expedition to Mars, is proving meaty and flavoursome fare.
As they prepared to touch down after 10 months of travel, the likeable European crew realised that they’d been beaten to it by their dastardly US rivals. More spookily, Russian cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov (Arben Bajraktaraj) – the first man to die during a space mission, in 1967 – was found alive, well, strangely ageless and prone to suddenly appearing in corridors with a beatific expression.
The penultimate double-bill saw a tense stand-off at gunpoint between the two crews, while the on-board computer went rogue. Out on the red planet’s surface, our heroine and ship’s psychologist Jeanne Renoir (Hélène Viviès) was psychically linked to the enigmatic Komarov. On his bidding, she ventured into a carved underground temple and made some miraculous discoveries: not just running water and breathable air but chilling evidence that humans had walked on Mars a long time before.
Missions is all the things you’d expect from a subtitled French series on BBC Four: classy, stylish and strongly performed. Its filmic sensibility is reminiscent not just of Ridley Scott’s The Martian and Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar but, with its muted colour palette and throbbing electronic soundtrack, the work of director Michael Mann. Meanwhile, the retro-styled flashbacks to the Soviet era, when Komarov was forever in the shadow of his great friend Yuri Gagarin, recall Gorky Park and spy drama The Americans.
Missions is as much of a psychological workplace drama as a sci-fi one. I’m just worried that nobody’s watching it. Comprising 10 punchy 26-minute episodes, it’s well worth your time on iplayer. Take une giant leap for humanité.
Secrets of the Chocolate Factory Missions