Miriam faces up to a weighty issue
Miriam’s Big Fat Adventure
BBC2, 9pm IF you’ve ever seen actress Miriam Margolyes on a chat show (on which she’s usually very good value), then you may think of her as someone who is comfortable in her own skin. But it turns out that isn’t quite the case. Miriam says: “I’m happy with who I am, I’m happy with my face, I’m happy with my life, but I am disgusted by my body. I loathe it. If I could migrate my whole personality and my face onto another body, I would be delighted!” Apparently, she’d most like to swap her body for Claudia Winkleman’s, although she knows that’s unlikely to happen. At the age of 78, she also realises that having been fat (a word she sees no point in shying
away from) for as long as she can remember, there’s not much time left to do something about the body she does have. At least, the actress and presenter knows she’s not alone in having excess pounds. So, in the twopart documentary Miriam’s Big Fat Adventure, which is showing on consecutive evenings, she’s travelling around Britain to find out why, despite all the pressure to be thin and the information about healthy lifestyles, the nation is more overweight than ever before. Miriam says: “I’ve worried about my weight all my life and I assumed that everyone my size would feel the same. I wanted to see how people in the UK feel about our growing sizes, and what lengths people are going to, to try and deal with it.”
In the first episode, the Call the Midwife star checks into a weight-loss bootcamp, which offers calorie-restricted diets and five hours of exercise a day. It’s not really Miriam’s thing – she doesn’t make it to the end of her class – but it has helped 30-year-old Georgia to lose weight. However, the presenter wonders whether she will be able to sustain her new lifestyle when she leaves the regimented camp and faces the temptations of the outside world. Miriam also looks into the social stigmas surrounding obesity. She admits that she has dealt with being overweight by being loud and frank about her size, although she isn’t entirely happy with a friend’s suggestion that she might not be the same person if she was thin. Miriam says: “I mean nobody wants to think
their personality resides in globules of fat!” Her own attitudes – and her belief that all fat people want to be thinner – are challenged by blogger Bethany, who thinks that accepting and embracing her size make more sense than yo-yo dieting. She points out that Miriam has spent her entire life hating her body, but it hasn’t made her slimmer – or happier. Will joining one of the UK’S first plus-size dance classes persuade Miriam that there’s no one-size-fitsall solution to obesity? She’s going to be given even more food for though in tomorrow’s episode, in which she looks into surgical options, the health problems associated with being severely overweight and what is been done to tackle the problem of childhood obesity.