If you’re part of the apparently gigantic demographic that bafflingly isn’t nauseated by the sight, smell or idea of food preparation at any moment before midday, you’re in luck. Channel 5 has just announced that it’s making a Saturday morning cookery show.
According to reports, The Saturday Show will air between 9.30am and 11.30am each week and consist of chatty panel discussions and “cooking elements”. Clearly, this will come as a breath of fresh air to any viewer who wanted a viable alternative to BBC One’s Saturday Kitchen or Channel 4’s Sunday Brunch or any of the dozens of identical weekend morning cookery and chat programmes that ITV has half-heartedly barfed up onscreen at any point over the past decade, because this will be completely different. That’s right, Gaby Roslin will be on this one.
Until the day I die, I will never understand the appeal of weekend morning cookery shows. They don’t work as cookery programmes, because – speaking personally – I want to spend my mornings watching a stranger plunge their hands into a bowl of raw meat about as much as I want to spend my mornings watching a CCTV feed of a fire at a puppy farm.
And they don’t work as celebrity interview shows either, because the hosts are all profoundly disinterested in their guests; whether it’s James Martin’s smug insistence on switching on a blender as soon as anyone other than him opens their mouth, or the way Sunday Brunch’s Tim Lovejoy only responds to anything with a bored “yeah” because he’s permanently distracted by the berserk recurring reverie where it’s still 15 years ago and he’s playing foosball with Kasabian in Camden to the sound of Good Enough by Dodgy and everything was better then because you could still say “birds” instead of “women”.
There was a time, not so long ago, when Saturday morning television was devoted to children, the only people who had any logical reason to be awake on Saturday mornings. These shows did a huge amount to shape generations of Britons. SM:TV and Dick and Dom taught them bawdy irreverence. Going Live taught them how to prepare for puberty. Swap Shop taught them the basic mechanics of the barter system. Saturday Superstore taught them how to prank Matt Bianco.
To some extent, Channel 5’s Milkshake was the last remaining hold-out of terrestrial kids’ TV, but now that’s about to be truncated too, just so that Roslin can be the ninth person that day to show you how to stop your beef wellington from getting soggy.
Of course, some will claim that the rise of multichannel television has meant that Saturday morning kids’ TV is unnecessary, because children now have several different permanent outlets that are designed exclusively for their needs. But guess what? So have cookery fans. There are billions of food channels on TV, all full of the same guffy waffle and self-indulgent cosiness and C-list chefs whose adjective vocabulary literally just consists of the word “ultimate” as the weekend morning shows. If people want to watch cookery in the mornings so much, that’s where they should go.
Saturday morning telly should be full of primary colours and screeching and badly dubbed Japanese cartoons. But it isn’t. It’s full of bodywarmer-wearing idiots called Jeremy who phone up James Martin to ask him the best way to prepare grouse, even though Google exists now. And that’s such a shame. TV needs another weekend morning cookery show like it needs a hole in the head.
