Tastebuds will be tingling
ADECENT chunk of the British populace will be in France for their summer holidays, consuming industrial quantities of croissants. INSIDE THE FACTORY (BBC2,
8pm) rubs salt into the wound of those of us left at home by devoting a whole episode to France’s most famous flaky pastry.
GreggWallace heads to a French factory that churns out 336,000 croissants a day to follow their production, from the delivery of 21 tonnes of butter to seeing how they layer the butter between sheets of dough to make it flaky, and use 83-year-old yeast to create
the perfect flavour. Meanwhile, Cherry Healey meets a professor who has done studies into the perfect way to eat a croissant.
Apparently, it’s not just down the hatch – the croissant needs to be warm so the butter melts, have jam dolloped on to provide a sugar hit, and then eaten from a paper bag to provide the right sound effect. But just as you’ll be salivating so much you’re considering a dash to the supermarket for today’s leftover croissants, historian Ruth Goodman has a shocking fact.
Croissants, arguably the national food of France, didn’t originate there at all, but in Austria. Our Gallic neighbours will be spluttering into their café au lait.
Summer is usually a bit of a drama desert, but KEEPING
FAITH (BBC2, 9pm) has proven an oasis with its twisty murder mystery and powerhouse performance by Eve Myles.
To be fair, Myles has a juicy plot to wrestle with, given that Faith’s life resembles not so much a car crash as a seven-car pile-up.After confidently tackling her first murder case, defending Madlen Vaughan against the charge of killing her husband, Faith’s lost, and tonight Madlen receives her sentence.
On the home front, Faith’s wayward husband Evan (Bradley Freegard, Myles’ real-life spouse) is about to be released from prison, setting everyone’s nerves on edge.
Faith’s not entirely pleased about his return, given her kids aren’t either, and she harbours feelings for Steve (Mark Lewis Jones).
We don’t see nearly enough of Kathy Burke on our screens these days, so it’s great she’s back on the
box in KATHY BURKE’S ALL WOMAN (C4, 10pm).
But instead of tackling a comedy role, Kathy comes over all Stacey Dooley to explore various rites of passage – cosmetic surgery, childbirth, marriage – she has never experienced.
Kathy kicks off with a look at why today’s young women are so obsessed with surface beauty, paying for procedures.
“Just because I’m happy with my big fat self, it doesn’t mean other women are,” she surmises. Unsurprisingly, Kathy spends most of the hour looking aghast and sad at what today’s Instagrammers will do to prettify themselves.