The images may be mouth-watering on Food's Greatest Hits, but the show itself is bland..
Pre-Christmas food programmes are predictably full of celeb chefs lavishing goose fat on vegetables and pouring gallons of brandy over puddings. But by January we're reaching for the Gaviscon, rather than the buttermilk cream.
So, it's perhaps not a bad time to be screening US series Food's Greatest Hits (Wednesdays, 8.30pm, Food TV) which focuses more on fun facts and history about various iconic American dishes rather than telling you how to cook stuff.
Each episode has a theme – diner food, sandwiches, breakfast foods. The format includes a chirpy narrator throwing out random facts about the food item in question along with some snippets of history. There are pictures of food, some people who have presented other cooking shows comment on the foods and finally someone cooks the food off camera and some "tasters" eat it and say if they like it or not.
The conclusions in How to Lose Weight Well are rather obvious. These should be pretty much off the menu.
All of which doesn't sound too bad on paper. But it's extremely tedious in the execution.
It poses questions you never asked or cared about. Like why are club sandwiches cut in triangles? Then it fails to answer them properly (possibly something to do with stuffing as much as possible into your mouth, but also possibly something to do with the ease of spreading mayo on triangle shape).
The talking heads invited in to pad out the show make meaningless and largely untrue comments like "Everyone has good memories of burgers". Look, I don't mind a burger, but they don't figure highly in my happy memories ranking and I'm willing to bet that's the same for many of you.
It's about food in theory rather than practice and that's not necessarily a bad thing – Heston Blumenthal has made his television career on it. I've never had any intention of cooking food for astronauts and I still watched Heston doing it. But he is passionate about what he does and I think that's the problem with Food's Greatest Hits. It feels so utterly soul-less, rolled off a production line with empty words and fluffy format.
Fluffy might be good when it comes to pancakes – I'm not so sure it works as a creative approach to television production.
How To Lose Weight Well (Sundays, 8.30pm, Vibe) is all about not eating. Cheery doctor, Xand van Tulleken, gets together with a nutritionist and a chef and finds some willing guinea pigs to try popular diets.
They try out all kinds of outlandish weight-loss methods from the Master Cleanse (drink only maple syrup, water, lemon juice and cayenne pepper) to the 5:2 (eat five days, fast two) and the Bulletproof diet (only eat solid food between 2pm and 8pm). There's a guy trying hypnotherapy and even Dr van Tulleken gets in on the act – double dosing on tablets that stop you absorbing fat.
Ultimately the conclusions are obvious. Eat more vegetables and fruit and less cakes; extreme cleanse diets are hard to stick to and double-dosing on anti-fat absorption tablets can have some unpleasant results. Hardly ground-breaking, but entertaining.
NEWS REFERANCE: STUFF
