TV Food Shocker Hits Britain

I do like to watch the odd TV cooking programme - I'm partial to Saturday Kitchen and can sometimes be caught watching Great British Menu, Neneh and Andi, Hairy Bikers or even - God help me - The F Word. Of course many TV cooking series are just inexpensive rubbish, made to fill schedule gaps at low cost. But few shows are positively shocking, like the one I came across the other day while idly flicking television channels. Aaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh!

This frightening show satirises the physical characteristics of two totally weird and differently dimensioned presenters, operating under pseudonyms "Ben" and "Small". One of them, with the aid of a spoonful of something unspecified, appears to fly as if in a hallucinogenic state. And they both laugh a great deal for no apparent reason, confirming my suspicions about the consumption of illegal substances. Like Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares, each programme follows the hosts as they focus on someone in the food production or hospitality industry who is suffering from an acute business problem.

This week's episode featured an under-aged, unqualified female street gangster chef by the name of L.R.R. Hood, whose signature dish is the embarrassingly retro platter cakes in a basket". Ms. Hood had been endeavouring to diversify her portfolio with a home delivery service in her local conservation area, "the woods". Various attempts to deliver food to a customer known as Grandmother had been thwarted by a local mugger operating under the street-name B. B. Wolf. The shocking part came when Ms. Hood demonstrated her woeful lack of knowledge of local flora. Intending to create a new dish based on damask rose petals, courgette florets, borage blossoms, carnation petals, lilac flowers and sunflower buds, the inexperienced chef instead picked a basket selection of inedible flowers which caused Wolf to experience a severe bout of sickness.

Unqualified chef, L.R.R. Hood

Rural mugger, B.B. Wolf

Inexplicably, this resulted in the perennial recidivist undergoing a rehabilitation transformation, leading to his preparation of a large basket of garish pink cupcakes by way of reparation for past misdeeds. In flagrant disregard of food hygiene regulations, not only did Ms. Hood accept these food items from this unregistered supplier, she resold them in her café without any documentation of produce provenance, without clear labelling of salt and sugar content, and with no checking of sell-by dates. When challenged on this issue, her kitchen staff just laughed it off. Other shows feature an elderly, over-diversified dairy farmer named Macdonald, an acute arachnophobe called Muffet, an ovoid-shaped teenager with brittle bone syndrome called H. Dumpty and two geriatricidal juvenile litter-louts from a broken family named Hansel and Gretel. I can only warn viewers not to watch this shocking series. For those who want to form their own opinions, this shows how the large presenter assaults the more petite one with a whisk and this shows the diminutive one resorting to psychedelic trips as a consequence.

Meanwhile, here's a sample of some of the less offensive dialogue from the show:

Ben:	"Remember to get your grown-up helper to do this bit because the oven is hot, hot, hot!"
Small:	"Yes!"
Ben:	"Yes! Have you washed your hands?"
Both:	"All clean and ready to cook!"
Ben:	"Here comes the plate! And she's left a note."
Small:	"What does it say, what does it say?"
Ben:	"Where do we look for things to cook? In the book, in the book, in Big Cook's book!"
Small:	"What now? Can we play?"
Ben:	"Not yet! It's time to clean and put things away!"
Small:	"Hooray!"

Someone needs to put a stop to this outrageous programme. It's bad enough when confined to consulting adults in the privacy of their own homes, but what would happen if children learned how to access it? Instead of relying on the nutritious offerings of that other Farmer McDonald, or on the nice bland shrink-wrapped produce of Mr. Sainsbury, Mr. Tesco and Mr. Asda, they might start trying to make their own food. And where would that lead? I can only dread to think.

Note: "Click photo" enlargement has been removed from the pictures of Ms. Hood and Mr. Wolf in order to minimise the risk of heart attacks amongst readers of a nervous disposition. Many thanks to underground investigative journalist Mike, aka. "Dad", for helping me to produce this exposé. Postscript: I've been asked by Sarina to provide video evidence of this show. Almost all the clips have been removed now, but here (with signing for the deaf) is one that's still available: