Mmmmm, a BBC primetime programme about sweeties. Candy floss-coloured neon signs. Mildly erotic closeups of coloured confections tumbling forth and melted chocolate dripped and stirred. A few sour fizz balls of history to pop in your cheek. A stately home to satisfy one’s period-drama tooth. This is not the same multimillion pound industry killing us all, the tobacco of the 21st century. It’s suuuuugggggaaaarr. So come, treat yourself to four modern-day confectioners dressed in Tudor garb rolling coriander seeds in 50 layers of sugar for four days.
The Sweet Makers: A Tudor Treat (BBC2) is a familiar pleasure. I’ve seen a version of this programme about 10 times already, the best of which remains 2008’s The Supersizers Go …, when Sue Perkins and Giles Coren indulged in the diets of various eras and basically got really hammered in period hats. This time, there is no Sue and Giles, Mel and Sue, or even just Sue, which makes it feel a bit like watching a nature programme without a David Attenborough voiceover. But all the other ingredients go down as easy as a marshmallow flump: the women in kirtles and men in linen shirts, the poring over olde recipes for comfits and the crafting of a small, disappointing banqueting house out of sugar plate.
In the first of three episodes, the team of confectioners go to the birthplace of the profession. Sugar at that time was a prohibitively expensive luxury, available to the aristocracy alone, and the reason why, it is said, Queen Elizabeth I lost so many teeth that no one could understand her. The confectioners have four days to make a Tudor banquet in the kitchen of Haddon Hall in Derbyshire, which contains some of the oldest equipment in the country. As wedding cake designer Cynthia Stroud puts it: “Nothing looks like what it’s supposed to be.” A small bundle of sticks turns out to be a whisk.
The rock-hard cones of crude sugar must first be chopped down and then clarified. This takes half a day, which is why four centuries ago only the very rich could afford sugar: it required a huge amount of labour as well as cash. They candy roses (in Tudor times, eaten as a cure for gonorrhoea) and stuff oranges with marmalade. They giggle over medlars, known as the “open-arsed fruit” by the notoriously fruity Tudors, and roll old roots regarded as the Viagra of their day in yet more sugar. How do they taste? According to sweet consultant Andy Baxendale, “like a root covered in sugar”.
Food historian Dr Annie Gray and social historian Emma Dabiri provide the context. Not only did sugar rot teeth (think of all those Shakespeare references to stinking breath), it rotted the nation. In 1625, the English seized Barbados, set up sugar plantations and started importing slaves from Africa. By 1700, 50,000 slaves were being worked and beaten to their deaths while Britain grew rich on sugar, prices fell by 70% and the masses fell for sweets. When Dabiri, whose ancestors are African and Irish, reads aloud early accounts of plantation life, Stroud, who is Nigerian, starts crying. “The cruelty is just unbearable,” she says. “This is the legacy of racism,” Dabiri replies, comforting her. It’s a tiny, powerful moment between two black women on a BBC programme about sweets. A reminder of why diversity on TV is so essential.
Writer-director Amma Asante, the second black British female film-maker to have a feature film distributed in the UK, is the first subject in the new series of The South Bank Show (Sky Arts). A poised, articulate and generous interviewee, she talks about the inspirations behind her award-winning films (A Way of Life, Belle, A United Kingdom), her intersectional themes of race, class, gender and identity, and her formative years as a child actor in Grange Hill. She grew up in Streatham in the 70s and 80s, one of only two black families on her street, and recalls the horrific racism she and her Ghanaian parents experienced: the graffiti, matches through the letterbox, her mother getting off the bus with spit on her back.
Asante says the central question of Belle, her drama about an 18th-century black heiress, is: “How do you find a sense of identity when there is no one around who looks like you.” This question has clearly framed her own creative life. After the success of 2004’s A Way of Life, which won a host of awards, doors closed rather than opened, and Asante “almost stepped away from the industry”. Melvyn Bragg asks: “Are you more optimistic now?” “I’m sitting here today,” she replies with a smile. “That means something. But we’ve got work to do.”
