Campaigning genius
James Delingpole
‘People have a problem with me,’ claims Jamie Oliver, but I’m not one of them. I’ve had my doubts in the past — overuse of phrases like ‘luvly jubbly’, the Sainsbury’s ads, the general extreme jealousy of his stupendous wealth, ruining my daughter Poppy’s name by calling one of his daughters Poppy and starting a massive trend — but I love his new campaigning series Jamie’s Ministry of Food (Channel 4, Tuesday), just as I loved his last campaigning series Jamie’s School Dinners and his ‘Look, I can still cook you know and, by the way, check out what a luvly jubbly, pukka vegetable garden I can now afford’ series Jamie at Home. The guy’s a genius.
His new campaign finds him in Rotherham — ‘****ing ****ed off’, as usual, for Jamie is not the sort to allow Gordon Ramsay to get too far ahead in the Roger Mellie sweary celebrity stakes — trying to teach fat northerners how to cook. He has chosen Yorkshire because obesity levels are particularly high there, and Rotherham in particular because it is the home of his archnemesis Julie Critchlow.
Critchlow, you may remember, was ‘the fat old scrubber’ (Jamie’s words) with dyed blonde hair and bingo wings who was shown on TV news stories taking fish and chip orders through the railings of her local primary school. It was her way of flicking two fingers at Jamie’s evil plan — as seen on Jamie’s School Dinners — to wean Britain’s kids on to food that wasn’t saturated with lard, carcinogens, ground turkey beaks, and E numbers.
Jamie’s first canny move was to butter up Julie. This he did by a) being very famous and turning up with a TV crew on her doorstep, b) being very down to earth and calling her things like ‘Tiger’ (Jamie calls all girls ‘Tiger’ and they can’t get enough of it: God, I wish I’d known that in my twenties), c) possibly, though I can’t be sure, paying her a large sum of money.
It was worth it, anyway — first for the great ice-breaking scene where Jamie had to apologise for calling her a fat old scrubber, and later for the scenes where she told Jamie that his plan to teach the whole of Rotherham to cook using a pyramid training scheme was doomed to fail. ‘They’ll be all eager when you’re there because they’ll want to suck up to you,’ she explained. ‘Soon as you’re gone, though, they’ll go, “I can’t be doing with this.” ’ In TV-land this is known as ‘jeopardy’ and all reality-style documentaries must display it, by adamantine TV-commissioning law.
This is why you know that when halfway through Jamie seems to be making progress — cue heartwarming footage of malnourished northern folk, who don’t even know how to boil water, blossoming as they cook their first-ever dinner (meatballs) — there will be a setback after the next ad break. Sure enough it came when Jamie’s star pupil — a photogenic young blonde housewife — tearfully told him she couldn’t afford the time or expense of making proper food any more. His other pupils agreed. ‘Told you so,’ said Julie. And suddenly Jamie was made to look like the rich, poncy southerner with fancy ideas which could never possibly survive the journey north of the Watford Gap. How will he get out of this one? Find out next week, when ... etc.
Part of me does resent being manipulated in this way. Unfortunately, after two decades of relentless dumbing down, most viewers have been so moronified that they can’t cope with nuance of any kind. They want to slob down on their sofa, switch off their brains, be cattle-prodded into the right emotional responses (up, down; sad, happy), then go to bed. I would protest except I’m just the same. I can’t even get through my boxed sets of The Wire. Too talky and muf fled, too complicated. Jamie (and Bruce Parry and University Challenge) are all the TV I need.
In Ian Hislop Goes off the Rails (BBC4, Thursday), our presenter failed yet again to answer the question which has been bugging many of us for years: just which way does the man vote? My own feeling is that it can’t possibly be Tory. I think he’s a bit like Jeremy Paxman — another of those handsomely remunerated, public-school-educated presenters who believes in most of the things a Tory ought to believe in (the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, riding to hounds, warm beer, Brief Encounter, probably) but finds himself in perpetual revolt against his true nature because he has a notion in his head that to be a Tory is not to be nice.
That’s just a theory, though. It might, alternatively, be that they simply understand how to get on in television. Suppose, as Hislop did, you were making a documentary about Dr Beeching — the ex-ICI fat cat who in 1962 devised the wicked plan to slash Britain’s railway system by a third. You’d hardly score many BBC brownie points, would you, by concluding that his brutal utilitarianism was just what our ailing railways (and, more to the point, the British taxpayer subsidising them) needed?
Hislop’s conclusion, more or less, was that while Britain’s railways had indeed been in dire need of a prune, the Beeching cuts had nevertheless done great damage to our sense of community and nationhood and history. And that Sir John Betjeman was a jolly good egg, much nicer than the grisly Dr Beeching. I totally agreed with all of this, but still felt a bit cheated. Hadn’t Hislop — yet again — rather had his cake and eaten it? ❑
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