The ego has landed – and not a moment too soon
Is there a sell-by date for television chefs? If so, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall has cunningly flouted his by taking his ecologically minded principles and using them to rail against the food industry. He has wagged a finger at the battery chicken industry, tut-tutted at the European fisheries policy and, in Hugh’s War
on Waste (BBC One), he continues to pester the big chains with awkward questions about their wastefulness.
It has been a slow-moving series. Episode one was in November, episode two in January. The subject of this latest dispatch was packaging. First up were the high-street coffee outlets and we saw Starbucks, Caffè Nero and Costa Coffee all put false claims on their cups which hoodwink customers into believing their cup will be recycled after use.
As usual, Fearnley-Whittingstall deployed his irresistible style of confrontation, somewhere between a Rottweiler and an argumentative sixth-former, to get them to pay attention. When no one would take his call, he toured London in an opentopped double decker decorated with cups, megaphoning his simple message. Social media played along, the newspapers ran front-page stories and eventually, to avert a PR cataclysm, two Starbucks reps sheepishly presented themselves for a fearful wigging.
The dynamic of these programmes is pretty straightforward. FearnleyWhittingstall has accrued a career’s worth of goodwill after all those hard yards cooking roadkill and placentas. The villains know that, to avert a PR cataclysm, they have no choice but to do time on his naughty step, where they splutter feeble bromides about how they must do better which he barely listens to. If it were a viable option they’d probably prefer the stocks.
Amazon was a slightly different matter. Eventually, after a long siege in which he bullied and cajoled them into responding, they deigned to fly over their so-called global head of sustainability from the US to explain why Amazon packages a couple of lipsticks in a shoebox. “We’re on a journey with this,” she cooed with practised faux-sincerity.
Unlike an Amazon parcel, this programme was densely packed – with good fact-finding, attentiongrabbing stunts, solid campaign journalism, plus some ecological recycling of stories from the previous episodes in which FearnleyWhittingstall marked his own homework. It takes a big ego to harness television and shame the corporates. But he can award himself a high score.
Has there ever been less excitement about the Olympic Games? With the build-up to the Rio Olympiad marred by doping scandals, Bannister: Everest on the
Track (BBC Four), which chronicled Roger Bannister’s heroic feat in breaking the four-minute barrier for the mile in 1954, was a salutary palate cleanser, and a reminder of what clean running looked like.
The story of his achievement is like an Aesop fable: so beautiful that it can withstand infinite repetition. As was explained all over again, he pulled it off with the help of his two pace setters, Chris Brasher and Chris Chataway, on Oxford’s dodgy track in blustery May, having spent the rest of the morning at work in London.
But there was plenty more historical context to chew on than just the big day itself. The story also told of Britain’s privations in the war, and rationing after it, Britain’s sense of renewal after the Coronation and the conquest of Everest. Despite the mountain’s presence in the title, the physiological parallels between man’s conquest of clock and rock were barely dwelled on.
Instead there was a sizeable cast of witnesses and historians, some now dead and speaking to us from the archive, including Edmund Hillary. Bannister – now 87, his memory still pin-sharp – was interviewed twice. Between them all, the edit chopped hyperactively to create a patchwork narrative, backed by a portentous soundtrack of sweeping strings and lordly brass, as if the story could not be trusted to look after itself.
The race itself was shown piecemeal, and in frustrating slow motion. You’ll need to go to YouTube to relive Bannister’s antelope stride in glorious real time, that time being 3:59:04. When, with a great sense of drama, the time was announced by Norris McWhirter, the crowd heard only the figure three. The rest was hysteria. Hugh’s War on Waste Bannister: Everest on the Track