ROTHERHAM has already given the world the Chuckle Brothers, William Hague and heavy metal goons Saxon, but its largesse doesn't end there. Indeed, large-ness is very much the issue in the South Yorkshire town's latest claim to fame: it's "soon to be
the fattest region in England", according to Jamie's Ministry Of Food.
How does that work? Surely you're only fat when the scales confirm absolutely that you ate all the pies. Presumably this is a projection based on previous kebab consumption, but is that really fair? Jamie Oliver, whose new four-part series this is, thinks not, and he reckons that "Rovver'am" can be saved, made healthier, if everyone pulls together.
The last time any Britons pulled together was the Second World War. The immediate aftermath was also the last time we had a food crisis, and the last time a Ministry of Food hectored the populace about its diet. Back then the message was: "Stop dreaming about bananas, they're never coming back – boil up some grass!" Without a state department to do the job this time, Jamie commandeered an empty shop opposite McDonald's, plastered it with posters of himself in a Lord Kitchener-style pose, and encouraged a sample group to try his simple, nutritious meals and pass them on.
"If we can just get mates teaching mates," remarked Oliver. At that point I was imagining Rotherham following the Jamie food plan to the letter and trying to recreate the matey dinner-parties in those gruesome supermarket commercials, only to end up breaking their banisters while sliding down them and knackering the suspension on their scooters. The never-heard-of-again band Toploader soundtracked those ads; Rotherham, it would seem, had an excess of bottom loads. And soon our intrepid chef was despairing: "I've been to Soweto and seen kids in Aids orphanages eat better than this!"
Mum Natasha admitted she'd never cooked for her children. Claire confessed her evening meal was 10 packets of crisps and a giant Galaxy bar. Another mother had just picked up her fourth takeaway of the week, and it was still only Tuesday. But they knew chips with everything was bad for them, which was a start. And after Oliver had shown them how to turn on their cookers (no, really), and when to tell water had reached boiling point, they tried his recipe for meatballs.
Oliver had hoped his tasty options would echo round Rotherham "like gossip", or be handed around in the way food tips used to be handed down, one generation to the next. His vision of community was idealistic and, it seemed, wildly overoptimistic. Julie Critchlow, Rotherham resident and an Oliver naysayer from his School Dinners programme when she passed burgers to kids through school railings, told him he was living in a "bubble". He could have countered by saying that at least he knew what a bubbling pan signified, but resisted. Then Natasha, his most loyal lieutenant, announced she couldn't afford his tuna steaks on benefit. She started to cry and he tried to hug her, only for her to pull away. They may be overweight in Rotherham, but they don't much care for American-style, touchy-feely telly crusading, and that's to their credit.
Still, I quite like Jamie's Ministry Of Food. That's despite the contrived drama, the star's unfortunate habit of calling everyone "Tiger", and the fact he's now swearing almost as much as Gordon Ramsay. The alternative would be the re-establishment of the real Ministry, and I don't think any of us could stomach that.
Oliver refused to apologise for thinking he could "enrich lives" with his meatballs, arguing that if the builders of spaceships had been intensely pragmatic men we'd never have got to the Moon. In James May's Big Ideas, the least annoying member of the Top Gear team went in search of the garden-shed boffins who've tried to help man beat the traffic with minimal hardware and a vertical takeoff.
The first in this series investigating radical technologies looked at all kinds of fantastical A to B devices, including a Russian sea-skimmer and one of the last surviving Taylor Aerocars from America. But my main interest in the programme was the progress, or otherwise, of the jetpack. As Daniel H Wilson says in his book Where's My Jetpack?, it is "the holy grail".
May said more than once that a personal flying machine was his boyhood fantasy and he used to doodle designs on his gridded geometry jotters. But he wasn't the only boy who did this; we all watched Tomorrow's World and trusted Raymond Baxter's vision of the future implicitly. Tragically, the jetpack hasn't replaced the 29 bus for this child of the Space Race. May visited a mad professor in Sussex and discovered that the latest refinements haven't solved the problem of your trousers catching fire. After being conned for so long, I regard that as a minor inconvenience, easily overlooked.
In Ian Hislop Goes Off The Rails the Private Eye editor revealed his deep love of trains. This was an examination of the Beeching Report, the "modernisation" of Britain's rail network which shut half of it down, and while the programme's title suggested a rant, Hislop was fair-minded enough to point out that, prior to 1963, the service was pretty crummy.
But of course, he relished exposing Richard Beeching's simplistic economic arguments, and his non-existent social and cultural ones, in favour of branch-line obliteration – all of them approved by Transport Minister Ernest Marples, a motorway tycoon.
"What did we lose?" asked Hislop. "The poetry of the landscape – everything that matters," said the architecture critic Jonathan Glancey. The list of abandoned stations was quickly set to satirical song by Flanders & Swann. I thought the names sounded almost too quaint until my wife pointed out that I'd recently passed through both Blandford Forum and Midsomer Norton, en route to a 90th birthday party and a wedding. "Not by train," I sniffed, "and certainly not by jetpack."
