Don’t go looking for any answers in this soggy sarnie
The world of work can be divided into people who come to the office with a delicious homemade lunch in a Tupperware box, and the rest of us who subsist on takeaway sandwiches with all the pizzazz of wet cardboard. I can measure my life in M&S meal deals and Pret baguettes, and I’m not alone. Apparently, the British consume 221 million sandwiches a week.
With lockdown over, we’re drifting back into the limpid embrace of egg and cress on wholemeal. But just when you thought buying a sandwich would be one of the safer activities to take up again, here was Helen Skelton with The Truth About Your Sandwich (Channel 4) to strike fear into your heart. Oh no, she’s brandishing an M&S chicken salad sandwich, one of my favourites. “It would be naive to think this is just a chicken sandwich,” Skelton said. Gosh. What horrors was she about to reveal?
Well, none, really. Perhaps Channel 4’s lawyers had been busy ripping up the script, but the truth as presented here was unexciting. The average chicken salad sandwich has 25 ingredients, Skelton said. What are they all, what are they there for and are they a bad thing? Who knows, because the presenter moved on briskly.
Pre-packaged sandwiches are assembled in a variety of places, which can compromise food safety, we were told. How does this work in practice? We weren’t told. A man from the campaign group Eating Better said they had been unable to find origin information for 33 per cent of the meat in sandwiches they sampled. “It makes you think, ‘what else are they not telling us?’” he said, in a leap of logic.
An investigation into false nutritional information on sandwich packaging had potential but turned up only one offender. The programme honed in on the Subway chain, and the discovery that 10 UK branches had recently been given only a one-star rating by hygiene inspectors. But the other major chains had perfectly good ratings, so customers there could rest easy. A food inspection whistleblower came and went without saying anything sufficiently damning.
A much bigger story was mentioned here: the listeria outbreak that killed six hospital patients and was traced back to pre-packaged sandwiches. One contributor said it was a scandal that hospitals are contracting out the provision of food, and that they deem sandwiches to be a good way of feeding elderly, sick patients. A documentary looking properly at this subject would have been worthwhile.
Imade a mistake with I Hate Suzie (Sky Atlantic). After loving the first episode and feeling disappointed by the second, I drifted away from it. Then I decided to catch up, and binged the rest. But this is the wrong show to binge. A little of Billie Piper as a highly strung, self-indulgent, celebrity wreck goes a long way. By last night’s finale, she had started to resemble the party guest who just won’t leave despite your increasingly desperate hints that it’s past everybody’s bedtime.
Which feels a bit unfair, because Piper has been glorious: an actress without vanity, relishing the role of a character who messes up royally. The series followed former child star, now 30-something actress, Suzie Pickles as her life imploded thanks to some hacked nude photos. In the previous episode, Suzie had lost her job, gone viral in a road rage meltdown, and discovered that the man she had an affair with was a sleazebag. Suzie also smacked her young son – for a series that has not been shy of tackling taboo subjects, this felt like the most transgressive moment of all.
Could it get any worse? Well, yes, because Suzie’s agent and best friend, Naomi, announced that she was quitting her job and going to explore her heritage in Iran. “Iran? What will you even wear?” scoffed Suzie, who had never been more unlikeable. It was a scene which underlined what we had already worked out, which was that Naomi (Leila Farzad, brilliant) was the real heroine of the series.
Amid the black humour there was real emotion, such as the flashback to Suzie learning of her son’s disability. Writer Lucy Prebble has played with form throughout the series, each episode different from the last. In this, Piper supplied a voice-over while explaining the purpose of a voice-over: “It’s comforting… string all the s--- in your head together into a story you can live with.” Was Suzie a good or bad mother? A decent person or a dreadful one? She finally found her true voice and left her awful husband, but there was no sense of resolution. Perhaps they’re setting things up for series two, which would be welcome provided we have a long break from Suzie first.
The Truth About Your Sandwich ★★ I Hate Suzie ★★★★