A plate of ‘scouse’. . . is that like eating boiled Jimmy Tarbuck?
What the heck is a ‘food arena’? It sounds like a stadium for culinary sports cucumber vaulting, tossing the potato, the 100-metre runner bean.
Cooking Up A Fortune (C4) hurled three pairs of contestants into a food arena without telling them or us what it was. all we knew was that judge Dominic Cools-Lartigue runs four of them around Britain.
I tried Googling, but the first two results were in Bulgarian and the third was something about a street market in India. By the look of the tV setting, a food arena is a cheaply furnished hall where you queue for a dollop of grub and go to sit at a communal table to eat it.
But that’s just a canteen, surely. You’ll see one in every army barracks and, for that matter, in every prison. Imagine if, instead of eating at the NaaFI, generations of squaddies have been dining out at food arenas and never knew it.
there was no time for explanations as this new cookery competition launched, because the three couples hardly had a minute to prepare their ingredients before 50 diners descended, expecting a taste from each food stall before choosing what to order.
Married couple Sarah and Robin were barbecuing burgers in blue cheese, which seems like a pretentious
TUDOR TREAT OF THE NIGHT: Fans of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall series who can’t wait for the final novel to be published next spring got a taster, with a tour of Hampton Court on World’s Greatest Palaces (Yesterday). You could sense the ghost of Henry VIII.
way to get indigestion with a side order of high cholesterol.
Uncle and nephew George and Sam were doing a traditional Greek Cypriot moussaka, which they pronounced MOO- suku and not moo-Sah-ka — apparently I’ve always said it wrong.
the least popular dish was a lamb stew, served up by Liverpudlians Wendy and Nadeen. It looked delicious, but the girls insisted on calling it ‘scouse’, which is very off-putting — nobody wants to be eating boiled Jimmy tarbuck.
Channel 4 is fast becoming the cookery channel. Later in the evening the schedulers dished up Jamie Oliver’s Meat-Free Meals, followed by Food Unwrapped, and tonight we return to the Bake Off tent. the best of these encourage us to try their recipes at home, but Cooking Up a Fortune is simply an invitation to lick our lips at cartons of fancy fast food.
Nothing could put you off your food faster that the sight of Imelda Staunton as devoted mother Karen, in A Confession (ItV), trying to help her daughter Becky (Stephanie hyam) kick drug addiction by going cold turkey. In a real-life drama that has unflinchingly shown us kidnapping, prostitution and the trauma of grief, the scene of Becky shrieking and spitting at her mum as she begged for heroin was the most shocking of all.
almost as upsetting was the moment when Karen, unable to prevent her daughter from getting drugs, stood guard over her as she scored from her dealer in the street — reasoning that, if she couldn’t save Becky, she could at least try to protect her.
this was a starkly painted portrait of an ordinary family consumed by a nightmare. that makes it doubly distasteful for C4 tonight to return to an amsterdam drugs den and another episode of the jokey, synthetically sentimental high Society: Cannabis Cafe . . . in which Brits try drugs for the first time.
a Confession, starring Martin Freeman as dedicated copper Superintendent Steve Fulcher, is a six-part serial. By the end of the second episode, detectives had already arrested suspect Christopher halliwell.
the show’s title suggests the main action centres not on the manhunt but on the interrogations that follow. this drama is just getting going.