Jamie Oliver

I'm back in love with Jamie Oliver! We kind of fell out over 'Jamie's Ministry of Food', the TV series tackling obesity in Rotherham, mostly spent patronising fat working-class people in a Northern town because they preferred their chips over tapas, a rather cheap shot from Britain's favourite chef. I'm sure he didn't mean it that way but the people that put the show together probably did.


The whole exercise, at the time, ...
...enjoyable cooking series in America, Jamie back on form and how we like him..


Oliver likes to act working-class but he's middle-class Essex (if that's possible), kin to a mum and dad who ran a nice cosy country pub near Chelmsford, sending Jamie off to catering college so he could dish up tastier recipes than his old man when he inherited the pub. But it was not to be and Jamie (whose dozy look often makes you think he's in ... more

I'm back in love with Jamie Oliver! We kind of fell out over 'Jamie's Ministry of Food', the TV series tackling obesity in Rotherham, mostly spent patronising fat working-class people in a Northern town because they preferred their chips over tapas, a rather cheap shot from Britain's favourite chef. I'm sure he didn't mean it that way but the people that put the show together probably did.

The whole exercise, at the time, seemed less about helping the people of Britain's fattest city lose weight through healthy eating but more about selling copies of his preceding recipe book for fat people from northern towns. It was a good idea in practice, teaching a small group of people how to cook healthier recipes and then pass it on to more people and hope it balloons up to impressive numbers of healthy eaters across the country. But once the cameras had gone so had the experiment, people preferring to take part just to be on telly rather than be thin. Not surprisingly the pseudo cockney has yet to follow up the series with a visit to a flabby southern town, instead getting as far away as possible from Rotherham by doing a rather enjoyable cooking series in America, Jamie back on form and how we like him..

Oliver likes to act working-class but he's middle-class Essex (if that's possible), kin to a mum and dad who ran a nice cosy country pub near Chelmsford, sending Jamie off to catering college so he could dish up tastier recipes than his old man when he inherited the pub. But it was not to be and Jamie (whose dozy look often makes you think he's in a coma, that bit of dribble lurking on his blubbery lips) had a bit of pukka about him and went on to be very successful, riding the wave of TV cook success as he pushed up his personal fortune up to an impressive £10 million pounds. But in the credit crunch many TV chefs had over extended themselves, Gordon Ramsey's empire now teetering on the edge and the squeaky voiced and irritating Anthony Worrall-Thompson (the world's tallest midget) seeing his bank manager call in the debt.

Jamie has done ok though as he manages to hold onto his core audience of housewives as these shows increasingly become less about the recipe and more about the personalities, the king of them all in Keith Floyd who started of all this TV cook gallivanting all around the world stuff recently dying of cancer. Now that guy was entertaining and patronising. But at least the people of Rotherham would have known that fact from day one and so in on the joke. Jamie, what were you playing at!

Ramsay and Oliver are very similar characters in that they both take their charisma and cooking on the road to the masses, getting their hands dirty with their public so self- perpetuating their appeal, a vanity exercise if the truth be told. Ramsay has a much bigger ego and so the brash and showy 'F Word' is more his territory, mixing with the celebrities so they get to reciprocate and draw on him for publicity. The new F Word series has amalgamated the BBCs 'Restaurant' style approach (playing on the other side right now) after Ramsey came in for some stick over the once excellent Kitchen Nightmares formula for not practicing what he preaches, caught out using precooked ingredients in his swanky restaurants, an absolute no no to the chefs at the restaurants and pubs he tries to sort out, usually earning them a proper bollocking form the now confirmed hypocrite. It's pretty obvious in recession that restaurants have to cut corners and they all use precooked food. At least Jamie has avoided that showbiz crowd and cheating on his cooking. It's also noticeable both Jamie and Ramsay have cut out the swearing in their new series and apparently Ramsay managed just three 'F's last week, down by 146 swear word son this time last year.

Jamie's TV career really took of with the series '15', his apparent altruistic gesture to take troubled kids in off the street and give them a chance of catering career, again pushing his pseudo working-class credentials. But the show was not all that it seemed. The '15' stood for the 15 trainee chefs Jamie took from London's roughest school-leavers to give them a chance of that cooking/catering career in his purpose built restaurant back in 2002. Although it was good TV because the kids were a handful, after the audition process we later learn that just seven of the kids came from iffy backgrounds and we watched as none of them finished the show, the other seven decent kids from catering college and all surviving until the end, making the show proof that there's a reason why these kids messed up in school. It was a bold gesture from Jamie as he claims he put a lot of his own money into the restaurant and experiment, and the fact none of the kids ever got a job at 15 suggest he hedged his bets some with taking on ringers, although it didn't stop him rolling the restaurant chain out in four other locations world-wide. Jamie, whether he will admit or not, used those kids to get publicity to start his restaurant chain. Gordon Ramsay, on the hand, has had to close one of his American restaurants.

Jamie's next project was the healthy eating in schools one, again very admirable but was it more about making his bank balance healthier than the kids? Getting kids to eat greens across the nation was never going to be easy and getting money out of the government for healthier school meals even harder. Blair took the opportunity to cash in on Jamie's altruisms and popularity by appointing him as the school dinners tsar. But the kids were not having any of it as school dinner numbers collapsed in the school where his healthy menus were introduced, working-class parents rebelling in that paradoxical blue-collar way that it may well be good for my kids but I'm not having some southern ponce telling me exactly that and so packing them off with school lunches instead. The new menus were losing the school money (why they don't have them in the first place!) and slowly abandoned the experiment. The vending machines returned, trying to make up the shortfall, all rather ironic, as was the fact New Labour has just announced that child obesity has 'stabilised' in recession, presumably because they want to cut back on school meals budgets. When his scheme was rolled out across the nation the kids just turned their back on Jamie's meals and went to the newsagents to buy crisps and pop like we did as kids to avoid school meals. That was only ever going to happen Jamie. All I remember from school dinners was mashed potato and brown gunge.

Jamie's recent success on TV have been the excellent cooking trips to Italy and America respectively, the learning authentic Italian cooking one especially good and appetizing, Jamie rolling around rustic Italy in his VW camper learning and then making old fashioned Italian style food. The best episode was in Sicily where everyone looked like they were in the Mafia, and probably were, showing him how to correctly chop and splice sausage and vedge. Oww, painful! The American series that has just finished was good too, although cliché and not about the food so much. Here we saw man of the people Jamie, getting down with the brothas in New Orleans and tolerate the rednecks of Georgia, who were less than complimentary to the brothas of New Orleans. Jamie noted that the new levies that are suppose to hold back the next big category 5 storm were the same height as the old ones that were breeched, but failing to draw his driver into any 'them and us comment', what makes Jamie so likeable, clearly a guy without any side to him and so a magnet to mass appeal, we his iron fillings...

http://www.jamieoliver 

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