Reality TV with guts

Jamie’s Great Escape (C4); Rome (BBC2)

short- bladed knife, and after a bystander helped him to give it a twist, the deed was done.

His features showed the strain he was under, his eyes squeezed shut and a look of revulsion screwing up his mouth.

Jamie called the experience ‘ hardcore and emotional’. But as a chef who’d cooked thousands of lambs, he thought it was only fair that he should kill one himself — ‘Otherwise, you’re a fake.’

Standing with the knife dangling at his side and dogs licking the blood off the ground, he admitted that the killing had been horrific, but not more so than the attitude of ‘a nation of idiots [not, I think, a reference to his Italian hosts] that couldn’t give a **** about the way thousands of animals are treated’.

But this lamb, he insisted, had had a fantastic life (‘It’s natural’). He was disconcerted, however,

JAMIE Oliver’s Great Escape could well turn into an escape from his angry fans after last night’s fourth episode of the cuddly cook’s tour of Italy. Not only vegetarians, but children and some grown- ups would also have been horrified at seeing him slaughter a lamb on his visit to the hunting-and- shooting province of Le Marche. And once the lamb had been dispatched, he went off hunting wild boar, armed with a rifle. He may plead that he missed when he fired at a wild pig, but a companion killed it with the next shot.

Most people in our consumer society close their minds to the reality that animals are killed for us to eat. As Jamie observed: ‘ Meat doesn’t come out of a plastics factory.’

But the primitive act of killing his own food didn’t come easily to the chef. At first, he questioned whether he could do it at all.

But once he’d helped truss the wriggling animal, carried it to its place of execution and watched the sceptical but expectant faces of the Italian country people around him, he clearly felt he couldn’t avoid it.

He was shown where to insert his when he cooked the lamb to be told by the grandmother of the owner of the farm he was on that he’d used the wrong ingredients. ‘It stinks!’ was her verdict.

After the boar hunt, it was back to show- off cuisine for Jamie, who had to compete against a group of mothers in the local town, cooking tagliatelle with a ragout sauce made from the wild pork. He lost.

This show may have alienated Jamie’s fans, but it was honest, even brave when you think of the backlash he’ll have to endure at home. Especially for saying, as he gazed at the dead lamb: ‘It’s not Sainsbury’s.’

I’M STILL trying to make my mind up over Rome, the £100million extravaganza put together by the BBC and America’s HBO. Some of it — for example, the extraordinary household of Polly Walker’s Atia of the Julii — could easily pass as an out- take from Frankie Howerd’s Up Pompeii.

While disporting with her lovers, Atia schemes to have her son-in-law murdered so that she might find a richer and more powerful husband for her daughter. (Indeed, Atia gave the girl on approval to Rome’s top politician, Kenneth Cranham’s Pompey, but he turned her down after sampling the goods.)

Last night, she did — bloodily — get rid of the son-in-law, in between arranging a roster laying down which member of her family should execute which other relation when or if Julius Caesar’s advancing army arrives in Rome. Yet she is the niece of Ciaran Hinds’s Caesar and has refused to desert the city along with his enemies, so it’s a puzzle why she should fear his arrival.

THE chief of those enemies, Pompey, so selfassured in the opening episode, has already become a joke figure in the second, engaging in petulant exchanges with his critical ally Porcius Cato ( Karl Johnson) — think R2- D2 from Star Wars — as together they beat an undignified, mutually whingeing retreat from Rome.

Pompey’s military tactics must have inspired Adolf Hitler, who was inclined to describe heavy defeats as ‘retreating according to plan’.

The Roman consul has decided to vacate the city for fear of the approaching Caesar, calling it a ‘tactical withdrawal’, though Cato, as usual, contemptuously condemned him for ‘losing Rome without unsheathing your sword’.

With several legions still at his command, Pompey needs money to pay them, ordering his righthand man Durio (Matt Patresi) to raid the republic’s treasury.

But having loaded a large quantity of gold on to a bullock cart, Durio is murdered and Rome’s riches hijacked by the soldiers guarding it.

With this incident, Rome suddenly turned into something of a Western, with the horsemen of Caesar’s advance guard cutting off the hijackers at the pass and slaughtering them.

But even this had an extra comic aspect with those stalwart representatives of the acquisitive Roman working class, Titus Pullo and Lucius Vorenus ( Ray Stevenson and Kevin McKidd), temporarily recalled to Caesar’s army, failing to find, or even look for, the gold.

I’m sure, as the 11 episodes progress, that everything will become a little clearer, though last night’s agony aunt session — with Pullo advising Vorenus to keep telling his wife he loved her — was anachronistic and cringe-making.

But it would be much easier to follow the main business of the serial — the politics of Rome — if the leading characters weren’t all constantly muttering in the dark.