Inside Cadbury: Chocolate Secrets Unwrapped (Channel 4) was clearly intended as a jolly puff piece. It would offer us, it promised, “unique access inside its secretive Willy Wonka world” – a tenuous relationship with standard grammar and immediate recourse to the laziest of cliches being the twin poles around which such creations are traditionally strung.
I was all up for it. The video doing the rounds on social media recently of a Wall’s Viennetta being made can only soothe for so long. I was looking forward to an even sweeter treat, something akin to an extended version of the Sesame Street segments that used to show products rolling through factory assembly lines. Because only sights of mass production can ever fill that howling, panicked void inside us all that craves order, uniformity and abundance. I wanted to feel again those few, fleeting moments of peace that they induce. You know?
Alas, it was not to be. What we got was an hour of boredom that also functioned – and the programme itself may not be entirely to blame – as the trigger for a very long, dark night of the soul indeed.
But – boredom first. This was achieved by various means. Foremost among them was that there was not enough footage of chocolate being made, bar (if you will) a few minutes when we saw fondant-filled chocolate half-shells having their yolks added – one side only, as any fule kno – before the pairs of moulds were slammed together to form a batch of God’s (or at least the Society of Friends’) greatest gift to us, the Creme Egg. It won’t do.
Second, there was the assemblage of – with a few honourable exceptions – the dreariest selection of talking heads ever pushed before a camera. They had titles such as “Chocolate devotee” and “Creme Egg superfan” and assured us that they really, really liked the combination of fat, sugar and cacao that humanity has been progressively fattening and sugaring since the Mayans started experimenting with the bitter seeds of the local trees and thought: “Hey, we could be on to something. Let’s tell the rest of Mesoamerica!”
Third, the programme devoted most of the hour to the development of a new product – one that is part of an attempt to reverse history and modern diabetes trends by being made with 30% less sugar – without being able to discuss or see most of it, commercially valuable information being what it is. The research-and-development team was led by a man who, while doubtless revered in his field (you do not get to be inventing chocolate for Cadbury without being Quite Good at it, even before the new owners, Mondelēz, expunged the last vestiges of Quakerish family feeling from the operation), was an effective reminder of the great truth that only Americans are born camera-ready.
Fourth, the programme studiously ignored all avenues of wider interest. Nothing about the golden age of chocolate invention, when the Quaker families – the Frys and the Rowntrees and the Cadburys – turned to the non-alcoholic, non-caffeinated stuff as the best way of going into business without compromising their religious beliefs and spurred each other on to ever more delicious heights. It touched on the Bournville Village, still extant, but you longed for more on the days when employers built whole villages for their workers and considered them something more than assets to be worn down and replaced as necessary. That might have been almost as heartening as a Creme Egg. Unless they were like mill owners who also owned the shops and pubs and so reclaimed the wages in another guise? I don’t want to know that. Maybe it was best left.
As for the long, dark night of the soul – well, I can only say that my prelapsarian Sesame Street days are over. It proved impossible to watch the astonishing physical and mental resources going into the making of a new product, the designing of its packaging, the White Creme Egg campaign to stoke sales, the piles of waste accumulating on the factory floor in the wake of a system glitch (it wasn’t even Fruit & Nut, which is fit only for the pigbin at the best of times) and not wonder anew if western capitalism isn’t overdue a reckoning. But maybe we’re in the middle of one? By 4am, I was wondering if the Quakers had caused Brexit and if Maltesers could win a second referendum. Why is nothing, absolutely nothing, simple any more?
