Spicy peas, Polish pastry, Italian sauce? Pass the indigestion pills!
FANCY eating out? For starters, we’ll get Indian samosas stuffed with spicy peas, and then tuck into Polish sauerkraut in fried pastry — with a dollop of Italian-style tomato sauce on top. Leave room for dessert ... it’s baked apples and stilton.
That was the menu for the first of Nigel Slater’s immigration cookery shows, Eating Together (BBC1), and if the mere idea of those culinary combinations doesn’t give you stomach cramps, you must have intestines of stainless steel.
This is what happens when Auntie Beeb gets out her sheet of checkboxes and invents a programme by ticking as many as possible in half an hour.
The brief here was for multicultural programming. Once upon a time, that was a byword for ‘low-budget’. In the Sixties, a multicultural movie meant a Spaghetti Western: shot in Spain, with Italian actors dubbed i nto English, pretending to be Americans and Mexicans.
Now it’s all about ‘inclusive’ television, ‘celebrating our differences’. Inevitably, when political correctness matters more than content, it wasn’t terribly well thought through.
Things started badly in the first kitchen, where a lady called Nita, whose Indian family had fled to Britain from Uganda’s mad dictator Idi Amin in the Seventies, talked about Gujerati cooking.
Nigel blundered straight away, by announcing that he loved Bangladeshi food and had only just realised that Gujerat was a different place. That went down about as well as asking a Glaswegian: ‘Whereabouts in England are you from?’
Oblivious to the fact that Nita’s broad smile had suddenly frozen, Nigel stumbled on. What was so different about Gujerati food, he wondered. Through gritted teeth, Nita said: ‘Simplicity and the freshness,’ managing to suggest that everything Bangladeshi was two weeks past its sell-by date.
It got worse when he dropped in on Rafael from Poland, to watch him make something called pierogi. There’s a reason why Baltic cuisine is not internationally famous, and Nigel got a whiff of it when an East European brown sauce was sloshed all over the chopped onions and mushrooms.
Trying, but failing, to be diplomatic, Nigel said: ‘It smells like the woods on a damp autumn day.’ He didn’t make it sound like this was a good thing.
After provoking an Italian woman in Bedford to tears by asking repeatedly about her dead mother, Nigel fled to his own kitchen where he finished off this hopeless jumble of a meal with dumplings made from blue cheese and fruit — what he called ‘the flavours of my youth with a multicultural now’.
That phrase ‘a multicultural now’ doesn’t even make sense. But it probably ticked another BBC box.
Alexander Armstrong discovered the darker meaning of multiculturalism, in Rome’s Invisible City (BBC1) as he explored the labyrinths below the Colosseum. The ancient Romans seized hordes of prisoners from every corner of the known world to be torn apart by wild beasts for their entertainment.
The Romans weren’t racist — they were happy to throw anyone of any colour to the lions. This was equal opportunity slaughter. Alexander used to be Ben Miller’s comedy partner, but he has left his sketch show days behind him and is now the most genial quiz show host on telly. Every contestant, however dim, who appears on Pointless is showered with his praise — even the woman last week who thought J.R. Ewing was shot in Dallas by Lee Harvey Oswald.
This delve into the catacombs and underground aqueducts of the Italian capital was Xander’s bid for one of the most coveted sinecures i n television — the travelogue presenter.
He’s perfect for the job, because he makes us feel that our company is all he requires to complete his happiness. He’d love to take us for an espresso in a cafe overlooking the Trevi fountain: that aura of flattery is his charm.
Out of the studio, he looks less at ease. On a moped, buzzing round Rome’s streets, he looked as comfortable as Ed Miliband on a skateboard. And when he was strapped into an abseiling harness and lowered down an eight-storey shaft, his knuckles glowed white with terror.
He was utterly charming about it, though. There’s really nobody nicer on the box.