Bak's TV Week: Gregg Wallace's Recession Bites

BBC2's Gregg Wallace's Recession Bites was an exercise in abject misery in which the smug food critic (him off of Masterchef) bellows rather a lot about how the recession is affecting what we spend on food. Like, duh.

 

It doesn't help that Wallace looks a bit like a potato with some basic features sketched on crudely. By a lunatic. But that's by the by.

 

I mean, do we really need to be told that, for example: "Most of us are trying to cut our food bills"? Or that internet food shopping is easier because it means you don't have to lug heavy bags home from the supermarket? I mean, really: it's a recession, not a global plague that makes people more idiotic by the day. Not yet anyway.

 

In a stroke of hilarious (but presumably unintentional) ironic genius, all of Wallace's links in the 30-minute documentary are filmed at Borough Market, where the fool claims to be looking for "what the recession shopping basket looks like." For the uninitiated, London's Borough Market is a sprawling mass of organic stalls selling the likes of veal kidneys, unicorn burgers, and cheese made out of pure gold to people called Tarquin, Poppy and Pip. And indeed Jamie Oliver. In other words: recession or no recession, most of us would have to remortgage the house for the price of a Borough Market lettuce.

 

With that in mind, you can't help but feel a bit sorry for Wallace's 'guinea pig', housewife and mother-of-two Tina, whose task it is to spend one week buying only Tesco Value products (verdict: false economy unless you like eating oily cardboard pellets masquerading as mince), another week shopping only in high street shops (verdict: not enough big brands), and the last week buying just frozen meals (verdict: if it's good enough for Kerry Katona, it's probably not good enough for anyone else).

 

"What do I know about Britain's downturn shopping basket that I didn't know at the start of the programme?" barks Wallace at the end of 30 interminable minutes. And the answer is: not much. Not much at all. Unless of course you count Tina's earth-shaking revelation that shopping in the local fishmonger is "less faceless" than shopping online, a fact that Wallace seems to think vindicates him for this horrific joke at licence-fee-payers' expense. Frankly it couldn't have left a worse taste in my mouth if it had force-fed me 20 frozen Tesco Value 'sausages'. And that's saying something.

 

 

The Elephant Men

Inside Nature's Giants. No, not a Closer-style exposé on the contents of Vanessa Feltz's stomach after a six-hour lunch at The Savoy, but a Channel 4 nature series the likes of which you've never ever seen before. Well, not unless you're a zoologist anyway. Or some sort of animal-murdering pervert.

 

With scenes that would turn even the strongest of stomachs, Inside Nature's Giants explores the inner workings of some of the planet's biggest animals. By (how else?) hacking the poor dead beasts to pieces on a warehouse floor. Delightful, I'm sure. Still to come: the giraffe, the whale, the crocodile, Daniel Baldwin. But this week it was the elephant's turn to go under the hacksaw, and boy was it fascinating stuff. And – whisper it – educational too.

 

Within minutes of the warning of 'some upsetting scenes', a team of scientists are knee-deep in elephant guts, gleefully prodding and stabbing with knifes to release the dead elephant's built-up gas, like teenage chavs slashing car tyres in a suburban street.

 

Those guts were a sight to behold, looking at first like the birth-pods from Alien, then an enormous c*ck and balls, before morphing into a naked Rik Waller arm-wrestling a giant suet pudding as they cascaded fully across the floor. And after the gore, the science bit.

 

Did you know that elephants eat their own weight in vegetation every eight days? And that they can barely digest it, so that when presenter Mark Evans jovially squeezes a faecal pellet from the end of the lower intestine it looks exactly like a pile of grass and leaves. Just slightly, er, stickier.

 

Did you also know that elephants practise self-dentistry? That their trunks are so dexterous they can use them to play darts, paint beautiful canvases, and make perfect soufflés? (I may have made one of those up). And, as a woman named Joy levers a rib the size of a Samurai sword from the enormous carcass, we learn that an elephant’s lungs are actually attached to its ribcage. Genuinely fascinating stuff.

 

The fun is sporadically spoiled by know-it-all Richard Dawkins, who at one juncture claims that the elephant's anatomy provides absolute proof of evolution because – wait for it – "It looks exactly like how an engineer would have done it." That kind of talk doesn't exactly help the cause, dear Richard. Dawkins continues with some information about the evolution of elephant tusks explaining, quite sensibly, that those animals with the longest tusks have a better chance of survival.

Then the madness returns as he makes the frankly ludicrous claim that elephants are already evolving smaller tusks "before our very eyes" in order to avoid being poached. Yet he fails to consider that the poaching of elephants with giant tusks would leave the smaller-tusked animals to thrive, and to therefore pass on this feature genetically. Any Creationists watching must have been giggling madly into their funny little Jesus books by this point.

 

Happily we're soon back to the action: an 'expert in animal locomotion' has the elephant's severed foot in a hydraulic press, apparently just for fun. He then explains, as a nation's jaw hits the floor, that elephants' feet are built in such a way that they effectively spend their entire four-tonne life on tiptoe. If you missed this, don't make the same mistake next week. Seriously, Dawkins aside, I will never look at an elephant in the same way again.

 

Quotes Of The Week

 

"Whenever a zoo animal dies, an autopsy is carried out as a matter of course." - Who knew?

 

"She's probably been inside more whales than anyone else on the planet." - Bet that's a conversation stopper at dinner parties.

 

"It's just like walking in high-heeled shoes, except those shoes are made of fat." - An 'animal locomotion' geek discusses Feltz's walking habits.

 

"We're no longer willing to pay extra for luxury food." - Tell us something we don't know, Gregg 'Sherlock' Wallace.

 

"Slightly tacky." - Iceland boss discusses the public perception of frozen food, as if his Kerry Katona and Jason Donovan ads are likely to change this.

Bak On TV

Read more of Stuart Bak's TV reviews in our Couch Potato archive. Do you agree with Stu's opinions? Disagree? Drop him a line on bakontv@hotmail.co.uk