Mmmmm. Fish and chips. The tang of vinegar on paper softened with rain. The menacing eye of a seagull. And Tom Kerridge sizing up the flakiness of cod and the spikiness of batter (yes, a batter’s spikes are a thing in the world of extreme fish-frying). This isn’t just The Best of British Takeaways: Fish and Chips (BBC2). This is the best of British telly: populist, easily digested, and sort of good for you in moderation.
We are a nation of takeaway lovers, spending an annual £6bn on fast food, and we are also a nation of food programme lovers, spending around 6bn hours a year watching celebrity chefs trawling the country in search of the best chip. So what could be better than some of the country’s top chippies competing in an outdoor fry-off overlooking one of Britain’s oldest ports, with some history thrown in and a few tears shed over a letter written by Winston Churchill, who referred to fish and chips as his “good companions”? It’s the ideal British marriage. Like Andrew Davies and period dramas. 2017 and anxiety. Or, erm, fish and chips.
In the UK there are more than 10,000 chippies, and Kerridge visits three of the best. None are in Scotland, which incenses this Edinburgh-based reviewer, who once cried with joy upon finishing a portion of fish and chips in Anstruther. There is also no mention of the Scottish east coast speciality that is salt and sauce: an unforgivable omission in such divided times.
Anyway, the first is Papas in Hull, the largest fish and chip shop in the world, selling up to 2,000 portions a week. Which mostly makes me stress about haddock stocks. Next, to Krispies in Devon, where the chips are fried in a secret orange batter. Sacrilege! And finally to Hook in Camden, where new-school fish and chips rolled in spice mixes are being turned out by a chef trained in Michelin-starred restaurants. More sacrilege! And still no mention of salt and sauce.
The three chippies compete at at pretty Brixham harbour in a series of challenges judged by Kerridge and seafood restaurateur Mitch Tonks. They have to run a service, identify different fish and come up with a reinvented dish. The overall result is – me really wanting some fish and chips.
Meanwhile, Cherry Healey travels the country uncovering the origin of the classic and how the two came to meet in a fold of newspaper. It turns out that – shock, horror – Britain’s national dish is not British at all. Fish was first fried by Jewish immigrants in the Victorian era in London’s East End, getting a requisite mention in Dickens’s Oliver Twist. (The Victorian rule of thumb is if Dickens didn’t write it, it didn’t happen.) It was probably a Romanian Jew called Joseph Malin who first thought to sell his fried fish with chips at his shop on Old Ford Road. “This country was built on chips,” Healey enthuses. And the chips, lest we forget, were built by immigrants.
Homes by the Med (More4, 9pm) engenders a similarly strong but less easily satisfied desire, this time to run away from the land of fish and chips and waft around a sun-kissed villa on the Ibizan coast. This can be the only point of such a blandly aspirational series, which invites us into fancy homes along the 28,000 miles of Mediterranean coastline where many of us can no longer afford to go on holiday. Maybe we are supposed to be chuffed that presenter and architectural designer Charlie Luxton is doing it for us. Maybe we are supposed to forget the humanitarian crisis playing out in the same Mediterranean waters over which such inspiring homes gaze out.
In Ibiza, Luxton gets a tour around a mansion “cascading in three storeys down the hillside” and owned by an Italian financier who lives in Bologna. It’s a glass and concrete affair with a 500-year-old olive tree shipped over from Sicily. After pronouncing it “jawdroppingly stupendous” Luxton lopes off to an 80s take on a Spanish farmhouse, a 500-year-old rural finca (which hasn’t, at least, been shipped over from Sicily) and a yoga retreat. No doubt, as the year flails on, article 50 is triggered, and the consequences of Brexit become clearer, such cloudless and mindless telly will be fed to us in ever greater portions, like property programmes in a housing crisis. In the meantime, I’m going for fish and chips.
