Steve Daly in Fat Man's Warning: Photograph: Channel 4
I am still reeling from Molly Dineen's extraordinary Lie of the Land on Channel 4. I watched it on DVD earlier this week and then again in real time last night. C4's documentaries are, under the aegis of docs boss Angus McQueen, currently having a renaissance - almost every week there's something unmissable. McQueen's own background as an award-winning documentary maker (The Last Peasants, Cocaine) clearly gives him and his redoubtable team the commissioning edge.
But I have written about Lie of the Land at length for this Sunday's Observer so there's no point in repeating myself. Suffice to say that I have been thinking about food, and particularly meat, a great deal this week, and another C4 doc, Fat Man's Warning, made for an interesting companion piece to Lie of The Land.
American comedian Steve Daly is 46, morbidly obese at 30 stone, and has nearly died twice as a result of heart failure, none of which is very funny. Steve lives in Vegas, the instant gratification capital of the world, and every meal he eats looks like a last order on Death Row, literally and metaphorically.
We didn't get to see Steve's stand-up act, which seemed like a major oversight. Does he tell fat jokes? He certainly wasn't telling any here. Steve has the face of the proverbial sad clown and an oddly thin voice suffused with faux-cheerfulness. When given an MOT at Sheffield University, which revealed that he is a 46-year-old in the body of an unfit 66-year-old, that his body is 52% fat and that his weight is crushing his skeleton, he looked as if he were about to cry even as his voice said, "Wow! I'm gonna die soon" in a tone most of us might use to say "pass the ketchup".
It was hard to know how much of the film featured his own input: picketing burger joints with placards reading McDonalds Made Me The Man I Am and I'm A Burger King looked good but were probably not his idea. All the way through he looked as though he wanted to lie down and cry. But Steve's message got through to a bunch of primary school kids who recognised that he is not a role model and that life on a diet of chips might be bearable with the addition of the occasional green vegetable.
Given the depressing prognosis, I couldn't quite see why Steve didn't just start dieting there and then. It is one thing to issue a documentary warning to Britain - already Europe's fattest nation - but at what cost to himself?
"This warning isn't just for England, it's for me too," he pronounced balefully, but I felt strangely unconvinced. Perhaps there are plans for a follow up - Steve sheds half his bodyweight and takes up marathon-running - though one can't help feeling he's already existing ("this isn't living") on borrowed time.
Step away from the tacos now, Steve - there's no wake-up call as convincing as being dead. Meanwhile, if what used to be known quaintly as domestic science ever reappeared in the school curriculum, a generation of kids might learn to cook as well as they can already consume.
