Inside the Factory BBC2 | iPlayer
Hugh’s War on Waste BBC1 | iPlayer
Naked Attraction C4 | All 4
Wasted E4 | All 4
I am aghast, obviously. I am sitting staring at a laughing man with the face of a pie take an inordinate interest, for an hour, in cornflakes. Has it come to this? What I am truly aghast at, if honest, is that fact that I’m getting truly interested.
Gregg Wallace (for it is he) is the mildly more troubling one from the MasterChef double-act, unless you happen to think John Torode has the hooded eyes of a wife poisoner. Gregg’s relentless bonhomie must grate, especially when tricksy chefs are trying out phenomenally difficult things like not smacking him in the mouth. But in Manchester, specifically the sprawling Kellogg’s plant there, he was more than matched by bonnes hommes and they welcomed him with high-fives.
Gregg was in Manc for the second series of Inside the Factory, a strangely adhesive little conceit about what makes our production lines, literally, tick. There was something hypnotising about the Brobdingnagian scale of the beast and something reassuring about the just-so order of things, from silos to milling, drying to toasting, and something vaguely stomach-turning about the 26 bags of sugar – there was the usual blizzard of statistics and my pen got tired, so I might be wrong with this – which go into every box of Crunchy Nut.
Gregg Wallace doesn’t really do light and shade – might as well ask a hyena to explain Cartesian dualism – so we got a fair old cacklefest of superlatives throughout. “Incredible” and “unfathomable” are overused all the time, of course, but it’s odd to hear them used about a big steel rice-blower. I sometimes wonder into what linguistic pockets Gregg might have to stretch deep if confronted with, say, the aurora borealis. For all that, he was amiable enough and seemed simply gleeful just to be away from Torode.
Unfathomable was what Cherry Healey was at all doing co-fronting this programme: Gregg was doing just fine on his own, thanks. But historian Ruth Goodman is ever good value, if always looking rather too keen to dress in peasant headscarves and eat raw turnips; she it was who explained the 50s American masterstroke behind the packaging. The little plastic toys, the join-the-dot games on the outside of the packet, it all allowed an explosion of pester power from kids as never before.
Madison Avenue quickly caught on to the fact that, as far as nutritional value went, children might as well throw away the cereal and eat the carton, a sound premise that is pretty much followed today; for all the fine words from the nice people at Kellogg’s about Vitamin D, no cereal would ever taste of anything if it wasn’t for all the sugar.
Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall had many words to say about packaging, the latest bugbear in his War on Waste. The terrific thing about Hugh is that, obviously, he gets things done: last year’s war on food waste has already persuaded most big supermarkets to drop their insane insistence on cosmetically perfect vegetables.
You’ve probably read about at least one of last week’s two campaigns: the 2.5 bn coffee cups thrown away in Britain every year in the understandable expectation they’ll be recycled. But 99% of them aren’t, because they can’t be: the inseparable plastic coating necessary to hold liquids makes them only suitable for landfill. It’s something of a toothsome scandal, because all the big chains certainly let us think for years the cups were “green”; but if you peer closely the claims only appear on some sleeves, not the cups themselves, and that Möbius-strip triangle merely indicates an item can be recycled, not that it has been nor that the company has any damned intention of doing so afterwards.
And a scandal it remains. It helps that Hugh is Hugh, that he can garner headlines for this kind of thing and get on breakfast sofas and everything, but I’m never drinking in Caffè Nero again, so wide is the gap between the image presented (all huge monochrome prints of toothless Italians being served in fountains by supermodels and simply screaming kindness and sustainability) and the venal corporate truth.
There was hope for Starbucks, which pulled out two heavy hitters to announce to Hugh that bringing your own mug would henceforth get you a full 50p off every coffee. “Result!” thought Hugh, and me. No. Just before broadcast, the boys from Seattle announced it had just been a brief “trial run”.
The battles continue, as they do against Amazon and its deliveries of, say, a simple ring or washer in a box that could hold a pony. Hugh somehow, being English, holds it in when fed such corporate merde as: “We’re on a journey to get it right”, “care passionately… fully committed” and just asks another polite question with the merest twitch of irritability: me, I’d long since have leapt at them with a stout tarred rope. A great series with the added bonus of making you very angry.
“Mitsubishi – changing perceptions with documentaries on 4,” intoned a sonorous ad-break during Naked Attraction. I’d ask for my money back, because this was no more a documentary than is Peppa Pig.
What it was was a risible attempt at a new dating show with the wizard twist that the contestants pick each other when utterly starkers. Anna Richardson encourages open talk from the pickers, about length v girth, say, or hairy v shaven and then picker and pickee go on a “date”. After they choose each other – no surprises here – on eyes, voice and personality. It left me feeling strangely depressed and not least when three men started applauding a naked women because she had chosen to leave some hair in her armpits. When did this all start happening? I don’t want to come across all Brexit, but surely internet porn has a lot to answer for. I never thought I’d be watching 12 people naked for an hour yet look forward more to a programme about cornflakes. A salacious yet unsexy disaster.
Wasted, a new comedy about amiable West Country losers who dedicate themselves with some diligence to getting out of their gourds at every opportunity, had some very nice touches, but relied almost exclusively for its humour on the scatological and I mean health-warning scatological; this was gamey meat indeed. Somehow it succeeded, by ratcheting up the nasties to the point where it’s as easy to give a belly laugh as a sigh of relief. But subtle, nuanced it ain’t, if you exclude the frankly bizarre presence of Sean Bean as an ancient mentor who appears in visions as a kind of Ned Stark/Boromir cross, but mainly as Sean Bean playing the actor Sean Bean. How did they ever get him to commit? I’m so glad they did. He shows remarkable comic wisdom and who’d have guessed?
