Chickens, Hugh and Tesco Too (C4), Jamie Saves Our Bacon (C4), Generation Kill
(FX), A Short Stay in Switzerland (BBC One)
What is Channel 4's “Great British Food Fight?” There are posters for it all
over town - Hugh and Jamie and Gordon and Heston, looking like a culinary
Mount Rushmore. Mount Mash-more, maybe. It's all been very gung-ho and
brie-brio.
But to what end? I mean, to what literal end? Because here we are, almost in
February 2009, and, in a manner very reminiscent of the invasion of Iraq,
Channel 4 seems to have instigated this “Great British Food Fight” - but
with little thought of an eventual exit plan. So far we've had the battery
chicken campaign, Gordon Ramsay's Cookalong, Jamie Cooks Christmas, Heston v
Little Chef, and now, this week, Jamie and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall have
popped out a one-off apiece. It's going on a bit. This Food Fight is turning
into the Hundred Years War. Hasn't someone won yet? Bake love, not war. War!
Huh! What is it good for? Absolutely stuffing.
Still, those brave boys continue to go over the top, time and again, in the
name of Channel 4's War on Beurre. Hugh was first, on Monday, in Chickens,
Hugh and Tesco Too, as part of his admirably tenacious one-track campaign to
emancipate Britain's 850million miserable chickens. Having identified Tesco
as the Osama bin Laden of poulet - “Anything lower [than the welfare
conditions for Tesco's ‘Standard' chicken] would be practically illegal!” -
Hugh displayed a lawyer-like calm in storming Tesco's AGM, and getting his
campaign reported in every major media outlet in Britain.
Tesco, on the other hand, spent a year blocking all requests for interviews
with Whittingstall, and then finally - in an act of embarrassing, total
corporate cojone-failure - wheeled out a glossy-haired PR drone to repeat
its press releases. It looked like Tesco was hiding behind a girl. They were
chicken. Bad chicken. Chicken sitting in a dark shed, in its own filth,
pecking other, smaller, chickens to death.
On Thursday, the always likeable Jamie Oliver attempted pretty much the same
thing as Hugh, but with pigs instead, on Jamie Saves our Bacon. Still apt to
be occasionally hog-tied by his “bish-bash-bosh-matey-chops” thing, Oliver
had, unfathomably, been placed in the centre of a 90-minute show that seemed
to be based on the early 1990s late-night youth show The Word.
On a primary-coloured set, in front of a whooping audience, Oliver had four
volunteers, plus Joanna Lumley, spending 24 hours in sow stalls, as an
experiment called “Pig Brother”. There was a sow giving birth, live in the
studio, as some kind of “Here come the little sausages!” sideshow. And in a
moment more The Word than The Word ever managed, Oliver - face contorted
with nausea - masturbated a boar into a jar as the audience cheered him on.
Of course, Jamie isn't the first person to masturbate a boar on television -
Rebecca “sex with David Beckham” Loos pioneered it as her signature
manoeuvre on Five's The Farm, way back in 2004 - but there seemed to be a
more palpable air of unwillingness here, as Jamie wailed, “It's spraying all
up my arm”, and then asked “Why's it taking so long?” These were not “happy
days” with the Naked Chef.
Soundbite boar-whoring aside, Oliver's key, sensible piece of advice was that
we should all eat more belly and shoulder pork - a simple economic shift
that would revitalise the British pork market, brought to the brink of ruin
by our fearful, vacuum-packed adherence to loin and chop. In the studio, the
audience whooped for belly and loin. Whoooo! Pork belly and loin! Let's big
it up for the cheaper, fattier cut! Like Katie Puckrick was being sassy
about John Major, and Nirvana were about to close the show, with their debut
British performance of Smells Like Teen Spirit.
Drama, and the big news is that Generation Kill has finally “dropped” in the
UK schedules. Or as normal people would say, “is on the telly now”.
Generation Kill is made by the same team - David Simon and Ed Burns - as The
Wire; making it, in TV terms, a bit like if Jesus suddenly reappeared and
went: “Actually, I've thought of some more stuff I was going to say.”
Based on the book by Evan Wright of Rolling Stone, who was embedded with the
1st Reconnaissance Battalion of the US Marine Corps, the title could easily
misdirect the unwary. The title sounds like a searing, powerhouse indictment
of the futility of war.
And as it turns out, Generation Kill is like that - but in a good way. I mean
in a really good way, with jokes, and pixel-sharp characters, and clean,
fast direction.Generation Kill is basically MASH for the Girls Aloud
generation. It's all about boredom, and character clashes, and the most
pampered, overentertained generation on Earth being sent out to fight a
half-arsed war in a desert. In the first episode, for 70 minutes, nothing
happens save some well-observed interracial name-calling, a platoon-wide
moustache-growing competition, and the rumour sweeping the camp that
Jennifer Lopez has died, news that the American Government is suppressing.
“They don't want us to know J-Lo is dead. It would f*** with morale.”
Equipment is shoddy - the platoon's captain attempts to FedEx a replacement
gun turret over from America. Everyone is wired on over-the-counter
ephedrine and Red Bull. After a rampaging four-minute monologue, Corporal
Person is told, “You have until 0800 hours to go f*** yourself.”
In the second episode, there is slightly more action - 1st Recon Marines get a
total of six minutes in combat as they drive into an ambush in a village.
When the skirmish ends, Trombley crows: “That was just like Grand Theft
Auto! Did you see that guy's knee explode?”
The rest of the episode is spent getting lost, being stuck in a traffic jam,
discovering that if you lie face-down on the ground when the tanks go past
it gives you an erection, and launching into huge, post-Taran-tino
monologues about war: “How come we never invade a country with women in
bikinis? I tell you why. It's lack of pussy that f***s a country up. If you
took the entire Republican Guard and comped them a weekend in Las Vegas,
boom! No war.”
Back in that traffic jam - consisting of 7,000 Marines and $1 billion-worth of
military hardware - the soldiers look up ahead, where Baghdad burns, in the
first 24 hours of George Bush's 2003 invasion.
Trombley stares out of the window blankly. Eventually, in the voice of a
child: “Sergeant, are we there yet?”
While Generation Kill was about thousands of people engaged in killing each
other, A Short Stay in Switzerland was about one person trying to kill
herself. Kill herself quickly and cleanly, before illness did it slowly and
unkindly. It was, as any future putative Txt Listings would bill it,
“Julie Walters euthanasia drama” and based on the true story of Anne Turner.
Anyone breezing into A Short Stay in Switzerland with the common caveat “I'm
giving it ten minutes”, may well have not made it to the end. Several
problems arose: not least that, in playing someone with a progressive
wasting disease, Walters was landed with the sad necessity of walking around
like Mrs Overall in Acorn Antiques. On top of this, the opening slew of
dialogue was so exposition-heavy that it almost capsized the whole project -
“You'll outshine that sister of yours. Your father will be great - he's
waited for this day for so long.”
Really, if you can't think of any other way to establish who characters are,
you might as well just flash up a caption with “THAT'S HIS SISTER, SHE'S
MARRYING THAT BLOKE THERE, THAT'S THE DAD AND, BY THE WAY, I'M GAY.”
But slowly - and almost entirely down to Walters's performance - the story
pressed on, busy with nothing else but the simple truth of dying. The first
palsy-shake and Walters spills a drop of red wine on to her book. Autumn,
and as plants fail, she pulls them up. The house becomes unmanageable and
she moves to a bungalow. “The cat will hate it,” she says, standing on the
patio. Her three adult children instruct her to keep living, as if dying is
merely an option, like ticking the “No publicity” box on the pools coupon;
but soon she's wetting herself in teashops and choking as her throat muscles
waste.
Having spent 83 minutes talking her children into letting her die, the end
comes in less than seven minutes. They fly to Zurich, and walk into the room
where she will say goodbye. Drinking the barbiturates - “What if they fail?”
“They never fail, Dr Turner” - she crams chocolate into her mouth to get rid
of the bitter taste, and dies, on a neat, single bed, before she can chew
it.
When the three children take the taxi back to the airport, they bring her coat
and handbag with them. The handbag looks as orphaned as the cat, back in the
bungalow. I can't imagine that you didn't cry if you watched it. It was
Julie Walters dying.
