Checkout Chris’s waffle
ONE of my favourite new shows last year was Channel 5’s The 1970s Supermarket. Did you watch it? It looked back at a decade when the nation’s shopping and eating habits underwent some pretty blooming radical changes, and while it didn’t really have anything terribly profound to say, nor anything particularly fascinating to reveal (I’m not doing a great job of selling this show to you, am I?), it stirred lots of memories, raised lots of smiles and it also earnt Rustie Lee a few quid.
My only worry was, how would they follow it up? Well, I needn’t have worried my sweet head about it, need I?
There are reasons why people who work in television are paid crazy amounts of money, and one of the biggest is the fact they’re able to think outside the box, as it were, and to stun us lesser souls with their ingenuity.
Hence we do indeed have a follow-up series. It’s called – wait for this, you’re going to love it – THE 1980s SUPERMARKET and it starts tonight at 9pm on, of course, the consistently splendid
Channel 5.
Wisely not messing with a winning formula, this new series brings back many of the faces and features from its predecessor, this time to recall such Eighties classics as the potato waffle, the Club biscuit (which had actually been around for decades, but who cares?) and the M&S sandwich, the latter launched almost by accident, as you may or may not be fascinated to learn, and originally sold in a package bearing the firm’s old brand name St. Michael, somewhat disconcertingly in common with one’s pants.
The producers have also, once again, taken over an ordinary corner shop and piled it high with products most readily associated with the decade in question, so that members of the public can then step inside, cast an eye over all this stuff and cry: “Goodness me, this ordinary corner shop’s shelves are piled high with products most readily associated with the decade in question.What are the chances, eh?”
Returning as well is Dr Chris Clarke – in white coat and safety specs, as before, to remind us that he’s a food scientist and not, say, some geezer off Emmerdale – who’s looking into how some of those old products were made and in some cases attempting to recreate them.
It’s thanks to Chris, for instance, that I now know a potato waffle would be really hard to recreate at home and hence will abandon my plans to do so.
The fact that you can buy 10 of them at Tesco for £2.35 (or 12 for £2 if it’s Tesco’s own-brand version) may also have influenced my decision to some degree.
But it’s largely because Chris’s first attempt at waffle making looks like slop.