A glance at this week’s schedules might leave viewers wondering whether BBC targets on diversity should be amended to guarantee greater generic range in programming. The Truth About ... Sugar (Thursday, 9pm, BBC1) and Eat to Live Forever with Giles Coren (Wednesday, 9.30pm, BBC2) are among seven newish BBC food series currently being screened. A tally that excludes the latest runs of Saturday Kitchen Live and MasterChef, the culinary franchises whose success can be held responsible for the schedules becoming morbidly obese with all these others.
Between them, the flatulent seven represent the three main sub-formats of this televisual obsession: reality challenge, recipe and documentary. Although, within those divisions, Giles Coren has become a one-man genre. Just 24 hours before advising of the diet that would let us spend eternity with him, the journalist was paired with nutritional historian Polly Russell to start their six-parter Back in Time For Dinner (Tuesday, 9pm, BBC1), in which a London family of five agrees to cook and eat the standard cuisine of each of the last six decades.
Although it is essentially a boil-down from off-cuts of similar previous projects, this is easily the best of the BBC’s fresh food formats. Both parents in the challenged clan are teachers, and so skilled at drawing observations and morals from the experience: the dad even appositely quotes Shakespeare’s Henry V, although, conscious that he is only pretending to be living in the 50s, prefaces it with an apologetic: “This is going to sound a bit pretentious.” But the opening episode provided frequent insight into the physical and psychological consequences of an era when television and eggs were not widely available and only women were permitted in the kitchen. The only drawback is that the revelations must inevitably diminish as we move closer to the present.
In another hands-on flashback format, Kew on a Plate (Monday, 9pm, BBC2), Raymond Blanc and Kate Humble report on re-planting the kitchen garden that used to exist alongside the botanical gardens at Kew in London. Little bits of social history (the semiotics of watercress, how the French wars popularised potatoes) alternate with Blanc using the produce to cook, such as a posh spin on rhubarb and custard.
Another example of the research-and-recipe approach is to be found in The Hairy Bikers and Lorraine Pascale: Cooking the Nation’s Favourite Food (Tuesday, 7pm, BBC2). Using their original screen name – having briefly become The Hairy Bakers during the UK’s patisserie hysteria – hirsute tourists Dave Myers and Si King travel the UK with cook Ms Pascale, exploring the origins of popular meals such as steak and chips or curry, then dishing them up with tips and a twist.
The aim of theese shows is to make viewers hungry; the documentaries, by contrast, are calculated to put couch potatoes off their grub. The Truth About ... Sugar starts with Fiona Phillips in a supermarket aisle, declaring that sugar has become “public enemy No 1”. The structure consists of stunts such as showing members of the public tables laden with all the sweet foods they eat in a week, then lifting a dome to reveal their personal intake of sugar piled in a heap. Older viewers will remember almost identical programmes in which the dome of shame contained salt or fat.
Behind its illiterate and weirdly pseudo-eucharistic title, Eat to Live Forever With Giles Coren is a sort of documentary – exploring theories about the connection between diet and longevity – but also tries to grab a slice of the challenge format.
We start with the presenter at the grave of his father, the great journalist Alan Coren, who died aged 69. Presumably to serve the remit of the documentary, Giles confides that his dad was nutritionally unfussy, although omits to mention the heavy smoking that may also have been a factor in his father’s relatively early death. Worried that he may die young as well, the presenter gets a Harley Street check-up, where he is reassured that his odds of becoming an octogenerian are good. This is a fatal diagnosis for the premise of the film – how can Giles avoid dying young? – but he cannily finds in the family tree a male relative of 93 and flies to America to test out weird eating regimes, hear about something called a “faecal transplant” and deliver perhaps the first mainstream TV link that entirely describes a bowel movement.
If that’s what factual programming comes out with, it was always going to be tough for In and Out of the Kitchen (Wednesday, 10pm, BBC4) to spoof foodie TV. Miles Jupp’s sitcom about the private life of a telly cook has some fun with the sub-porn camera-work on chef shows – ejaculations of sauce and oil, pestles grinding – but, in seeking to send up an aspect of television, In and Out of the Kitchen suffers the same problem as W1A. Supposed to show that the BBC is able to laugh at itself, these shows risk leaving licence-payers wondering why the organisation doesn’t instead do something about the cause of the jokes.
Even UKIP’s nostalgia for 1950s Britain hasn’t yet led to a campaign to “bring back rationing” but some action surely needs to be taken to stop the BBC stuffing itself with convenience food shows, many of them junk. Perhaps they could start by trying 5:2 scheduling, in which they refrain from the genre on two days of the week.