Jamie Effing Oliver!!!

I have been a Jamie Oliver fan ever since he highlighted the problem of school dinners in the UK and faced up to the mothers caught passing burgers and kebabs through the school railings to the very kids he was trying to feed real food.  Last night he took his saucepans and knives into battle once again back to Rotherham with his Ministry of Food programme.  But rather than cheer him on, he had me squirming in my seat for Jamie, in an attempt I can only imagine to fit in, had the F word spurting from his lips as fast as hot fat escapes a burning pan.      

The programme started well, cleverly bringing together Jamie and the school gate ringleader whom he had unwisely called a “scrubber” on Top Gear.  She has forgiven him it appears, but nonetheless relishes every opportunity to tell him that he won’t be able to teach the people of Rotherham to cook as none of them were taught by their mothers and “anyways they all live on take aways”. 

When Jamie was first on the TV his vernacular consisted of “lovelyjubblies,” “gorgeous” and “Bob’s your uncle.”  All very quaint but in those days he was preaching to middle class housewives and so he was at most the cheekie chappie or your favourite nephew.  Now  masquerading as a member of the indigenous population of Rotherham and pretending to understand a life of welfare and unemployment as he pulls up outside their sorrowful council houses in a Range Rover, he has lost all credibility in my eyes and surely in theirs.

He means well and I don’t want to see him fail in fact he deserves a knighthood.  In spite of the misguided behaviour he is genuinely moved by the plight of these working class, and often single parent families on welfare, feeding their kids on rubbish.  When he turns to the camera with tears in his eyes and says that watching a little girl sit on the floor and eat crap out of a styrofoam container with her fingers upsets him, I believe him.  

He has a small success at the beginning when he manages to teach five recipes to eight non-cooks one of whom, a pensioner, had never cut up an onion or pealed a carrot in his life.  Flushed with this small success he turns to the camera and shouts,

“I’ll soon have the whole of F***ing Rotherham cooking!” 

No he won’t.  The Pass It On idea (see www.ministryoffood.com) of giving out free recipes, teaching them to a handful of people and then each in turn passing those recipes on by teaching to two other people, will not work.  Something has gone terribly wrong with the working class in the UK.  These are people who prefer to spend their money on tanning booths and satellite dishes than on feeding themselves properly.  If anything is to change them it will take a huge amount of government funding and subsidies which is how ultimately, thanks to Tony Blair, he got the schools to start cooking real food again.

Morphing into one of them, getting down to their level, is not going to work.   He may sound like them, and even more so now that every other word is an expletive but HE ISN’T! 

He’s a star off the telly, a  F***ing celebrity chef! (To use his own words).

When the very acute, loveable ”scrubber” points this out to him and asks him how much money he has, he replies sheepishly,

 ”Yeah, I’ve got a fair bit.”

And that is where the problem lies.  He’ll never be one of them so he should just be himself.  Sure they want sympathy and understanding but they also want someone they can look up to.  They despise where they are and so becoming one of them or at least pretending to become one of them – they’ll soon see through it – will only make them despise him and his fancy cooking ideas more.