Jamie's School Dinners C4
Cherished BBC1
Planespotting ITV1
'Scrotum-burger' observes Jamie Oliver wrinkling his dear little dumpling of a nose while he gives testicles an undeservedly bad name. Nonetheless, the object of which he speaks is truly offensive - something which bears as much resemblance to a nourishing foodstuff as does deep-pan asbestos topped with a layer of crunchy gypsum and fluffy lagging.
Jamie's so-called scrotumburger, the texture of a tramp's sole and the colour of reconstituted Spam (that'd be what? Smap? Pams? Pasm?) is just one of the lunch offerings at Kidbrooke school, south-east London. Scared? You should be: remade as a Hollywood teen flick this would be titled Eueeew! I Know What You Ate Last Summer.
Jamie Oliver is probably well on the way to the knighthood with his crusade to create 'a better, cooler, cleverer, fucking nation' by improving the eating habits of a bunch of school kids, the parents of whom pay £1.30 per lunch, of which a mere 37p goes on food. By my calculations, then, a further 48p goes on special flavourings, E-numbers, preservatives, irradiated breadcrumbs and other random pollutants, 18p on school dinner research and development (deep-fried mash, anyone? Dinosaurfeet fritters made from the marrow of a real stegosaurus?) while the final 27p is obviously spent kitting out bossy dinner ladies in pristine white coats so that they look even more like Nurse Ratched.
Jamie's support act is head dinner lady, Nora. If she didn't exist, Victoria Wood would have had to invent her, and she's the perfect televisual foil for Oliver even as every single jury in the world would dismiss the charge of assault had Jamie resorted to battering her in her own deep-fat fryer. Charmlessly bossy - nay, bullying - Nora is an acquired taste even her own husband admits takes some acquiring: 'You either like her a lot or you hate her to bits ...' but when she got too much for Jamie he packed her off to his restaurant to discover the difference between cooking and heating-up.
Meanwhile, as with most of Jamie's projects, real life interfered with his dream of creating a brave new culinary world: the head chef at Oliver's restaurant, Fifteen, handed in his notice and Mrs Oliver was less than chuffed that her husband hadn't attended his daughters' bathtimes for two months, even as she sweetly gave him a satchel for his 'first day at school'. (There was a telling scene in which Oliver met his family in the park, attended only by a photographer capturing those allimportant, aspirational, happy family lifestyle images for his new cookbook, and a Channel 4 documentary crew.)
But Oliver's biggest problem was finding something decent to cook for 37p a head. Canvassing his own chefs, suggestions ranged from pasta to risotto, but Jamie circled his prospective ingredients wearing a diva's sneer. 'I can't work like this. I have to be inspired to cook,' he declared with the hint of a pout. 'Have you got Google?' he asked an assistant. 'Can you type "cheap nice curry" and see what comes up?'
Jamie eventually blew the budget and spent £1.10 per portion on his Thai green curry and noodles with butternut squash, 70p on cannelloni stuffed with cheese and spinach and a surprisingly chunky 62p on the chickpea and leek soup, but he may as well have been offering potato peel and toenail fritters with a sauce of pureed Whiskas for all the interest the kids had in eating vegetables of any description, even cunningly disguised.
We are, it seems, in the midst of a great and terrible western consumer crisis, busily poisoning our offspring with convenience food almost entirely devoid of nutritional benefit - an irony which would be entirely and necessarily lost on, say, the parents and children of Ethiopia, but one which nonetheless makes for yet another tasty slice of telly à la Oliver. Mrs O won't thank me for it but I'd quite like Oliver to spend his entire life making excellent TV series and his downtime doing guest appearances in other peoples series - as, presumably, would Channel 4.
Last week it turned out to be Innocent Women Suffering in Prison Week, for which the street-corner collection boxes came in the shapes of Sarah Lancashire and Lesley Sharp.
Lancashire's vehicle was BBC1's Cherished, a faithful dramatisation (by Gwyneth Hughes) of the utterly miserable story of Angela and Terry Cannings. Lancashire's roles have become less and less lip-glossed and more and more actorly since she quit her ITV deal a while back, but this was easily her least shiny to date, and I admire actresses of my sort of vintage who are prepared to look like the-morningafter-the-night-before, with the ageing process writ large in pore-clenching close-up over 32 digital inches. If, for example, Lancashire has had Botox, then the make-up artist made a mockery of it.
Lancashire was unsurprisingly fine, embodying the alternately browbeaten and stoic Angela with a quiet and compelling restraint, while always looking the part of a mother wrongly accused of the murder of two of her children, but Timothy Spall, as her husband, Terry, occasionally threatened to steal their shared scenes, if not the whole film.
Terry Cannings's journey from an apparently happy husband and father (though clearly this was a happiness forever held in check by the death of three of his children) to an alcoholic near-suicide, barely dragging-up, much less raising, the couple's surviving daughter, Jade, was a parallel tragedy which skilfully unfolded in this version of the Cannings story.
Terry's sentence was, in its way, every bit as compellingly wicked as that handed out to Angela. Though less obviously dramatic or showy, I'm glad the space was created not merely to tell it, but to have an actor of the calibre of Spall to make it all the more wincingly painful to witness. In lesser hands Terry Cannings could have been all but written out of action; instead here it was made clear that he carried the almost unbearable day-to-day burden of the consequences of other people's actions, and very nearly his own too. Oh and I don't know if an actor of Ronald Pickup's calibre would have rolled his eyes or smacked his lips when he received the offer of playing the boo-hiss role of Sir Roy Meadows, but he carried it off with just the sort of lowkey classiness one would expect.
ITV1's Planespotting, based on another recent true story, didn't quite know whether to consistently play it for laughs or affect a certain po-facedness, but eventually settled for taking the mick out of the Greeks and, obviously, the British planespotters arrested for spying whose story briefly knocked the war in Afghanistan off the tabloid front pages.
Lesley Sharp played the conveniently named Lesley, a long-suffering Mrs Overall in waiting, and new wife of Mark Benton's Paul Coppin. Paul's first love was planes - well, mostly plane tailfins, on which are written ID numbers, which, in turn, are transcribed into notebooks. Nothing could come between Paul and the potential sighting of a stealth bomber at nearby Lakenheath, so Lesley agreed to combine a little light planespotting with a honeymoon.
The ever-reliable Mark Benton not only captured the borderline compulsive obsessiveness of planespotting but gave Paul a sweetly befuddled edge which stopped you from sneering at the small-mindedness of it all. The script, however, seemed to have other ideas, mocking the protagonists by delivering a few too many exchanges of dim-bulb dialogue, along the lines of: 'What's moussaka? "It's made with aubergines' 'What's an aubergine?' 'It's like a swollen courgette ...' Which a smart script editor should have excised at the earliest opportunity for being almost as pointless as planespotting itself.
All of this lightly undermined Coppin's final moment of triumph in court when he overturned his conviction for spying (penalty five to 20 years in prison. Or, 'in times of international emergency', death) by producing a Greek planespotting magazine, thus proving to a sceptical prosecution that grown men not only could choose to pass their time writing down the numbers of planes, but some of them do.
'We're not fighter pilots but we are the men that we are,' he declared to a sceptical Greek squadron leader. 'We're proud to be planespotters.' Perhaps, in hindsight, they'd be better off downsizing to trains. Or buses. And don't try telling me there aren't bus-spotters because, while searching for bus timetables on the net a week or two ago, I stumbled across a website. Each to their own - personally I like to Stobart-spot on long motorway journeys.
On the subject of which, after 40 years as a Londoner I've finally baled out and moved to the seaside. As you enter the town a sign reads 'Welcome to Hastings - the birthplace of television' and just below is a separate sign: 'CCTV operates in the town centre'. I think I've finally come home.
