Home > The Magazine > Arts

Tuesday 2 December 2008

Dare to dream and make your ultimate trip a reality

The latest culture as recommended by our staff

Michael Henderson

Michael Henderson suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value events

Click here for exclusive articles, offers, tasting notes and discussion

Campaigning genius

James Delingpole

Wednesday, 1st October 2008

Jamie’s Ministry of Food (Channel 4, Tuesday); Ian Hislop Goes off the Rails (BBC4, Thursday)

‘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 arch-nemesis 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.

1 | 2 | 3 Next page

More articles from: James Delingpole | this section

Print this article | Email to a friend | Permalink | Comments (2)

Post this entry to: del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

George

October 2nd, 2008 6:42pm

Ian Hislop is easy to read. He craves approval, but at the same time is repelled by it.

That's why he laughs all the time at his own jokes. (When Nigella Lawson pointed this out, he responded to a woman who quite clearly frightened him to death with: 'it's like eating your own food'.

If you were a very small, small boy who also looked odd and were put in the public school system, you might end up like Hislop.

Being picked when quite young to be editor of Private Eye so you can get back at every one is very heaven to someone like this.

TDK

October 5th, 2008 6:26pm

You know that no government, the Conservatives who appointed Beeching or Labour who implemented the vast majority of the closures, had to actually implement his proposal. If was wrong, it was the politicians who got it wrong.

A perfect cadence

Stephen Pettitt

This year, on 11 December — and I wish more people knew about it than actually do — the American composer Elliott Carter celebrates his 100th birthday.

Forgotten wonders

Andrew Lambirth

Byzantium 330-1454
Royal Academy, until 22 March 2009

Out of the ordinary

Carolyn Bartholomew

Carolyn Bartholomew talks to Tilda Swinton, an actor who has made a career out of being unconventional

Life lessons

Kate Chisholm

Talking to my dentist, as one does, we discover a mutual enthusiasm for Radio Three’s Composer of the Week (Monday to Friday) and especially its presenter, Donald Macleod.