KEY POINTS:
The trouble with Jamie's Fowl Dinners (last night, TV One) was always going to be tone. How do you make a television programme which is really about preaching - and, gasp, killing a chicken in front of an audience - entertaining?
At least it lived up to the
billing. "Some viewers may find scenes ... disturbing." I found almost all of it disturbing, just not in the way intended. I hope somebody reported Jamie to the RSPCA, not for killing the chicken (cue cut to teary-eyed audience members: did they think their Sunday roast expired of natural causes?) It wasn't even what might, in a bird with a brain, have amounted to cruelty: bringing a load of chooks into a brightly lit telly studio.
No, the really cruel bit was having to watch Jamie goo and gaa at baby chickens. "Hello! They're gorgeous. Hello, my darling ... They're so, so cute." Even the duff one he put in the box the duff chicks go in before being gassed was so, so cute. Then it was, so, so dead.
This sort of carry on was guaranteed to make you feel much sicker than the fritters he made out of Mechanically Reclaimed Meat. Which are the bits left over, put through a giant mincing machine and made into things you eat when you're well bladdered, like dodgy hot dogs.
What was supposed to be so disgusting about this? He's a chef. I would hope he'd cook up his free-range, organic, feel-the-love before I stun gun you, darling, chicken carcasses and make them into stock. If you don't like dodgy hot dogs, don't eat them. If you do like them, you've got no taste buds. But you can hardly call that a sin.
Being lectured at by a celebrity chef on yet another crusade should be. And in telly ratings land it would be, which is why you have the shock value of the chicken being killed. But this is still not exactly entertaining. You need jokes, preferably celebrity jokes.
When you're a celebrity like Jamie you just bring in your celebrity mate Ricky Gervais, "animal lover", to make a few jokes at your expense, and the chicken's, to lighten the tone.
Trouble was, Gervais' jokes weren't very funny. "What's your favourite chicken dish?" asked Jamie. "I like to boil it in the cage," said Gervais.
"You're doing a good thing," said Gervais towards the end, "Ramsay's not doing this, is he? He might be a better cook than you, and more efficient ... And a winner. But you've got a heart of gold and I think that's more important in the long run."
Aw, so, so cute. No, it wasn't. Nor was Fowl Dinners entertaining or illuminating, unless you think being told that it's your fault (if you are a poor person who goes on buying two cheap chooks for five quid) that chickens are kept in horrid conditions?
It cheated, too. Jamie cooked up standard chicken breasts and free range chicken legs and asked the audience to say which tasted better. This was a complete nonsense - even before he cooked them in completely different ways. It didn't tell me a thing I didn't already know.
"They've [the audience] come face-to-face with Frankenstein chicken."
No, we'd come face-to-face with monster celebrity egos.
