Wednesday 1 October 2008

Soapsuds


Corrie
DO we think this week was the most badly-planned exit of any character EVER in the history of soap?
It certainly seemed that way to us. Last Friday, Jerry-Kebab (who we’ve only just managed to stop referring to as Sinbad) half-mentioned something about going to Spain. By Monday, he and his two youngest kids had gone. For good.
"Are you sure you’ve thought this through?" Mel asked him, echoing our own "viewer to scriptwriter" concerns.
"Yeah, it’ll be fine," breezed Jerry.
"But you don’t speak the language," pointed out Mel, reasonably.
"Ah – soon learn," said Jerry, a man who’s never even been able to speak Mancunian, never mind anything more adventurous.
"And you don’t know anybody," said Mel.
"Ah, balderdash and piffle," shrugged Jerry (or something similar) before he and his family set off for Spain with no job, no money and next to no possessions.
We don’t understand why Corrie have proved masters of the slow-burning plotline and yet can be so cack-handed with their slow-burning characters.
Anyway, following the rapid dispatching of Harry, Vernon, Jerry, Kayleigh and Finlay, Lovely Liam should be afraid, very afraid, now Tony’s in the know.
And, BTW, were you shocked at the sight of Rawsie in a revealing corset? Not us. The biggest shock is that she doesn’t walk around like that all the time.










Jamie's Ministry of Food:




“If Jamie’s School Dinners was Star Wars, this is the Empire Strikes Back,” said Jamie Oliver at the start of his brand new TV mission this week.
Yep, Jamie’s Ministry of Food (C4, Tues) showed quite a lot of the celebrity chef talking utter excrement – but this certainly livened up what could have been a very dull show.
The series is a kind of follow-up to the lisping hero’s earlier efforts to persuade schools to improve their lunch time menus.
Only this time, he wants to improve an ENTIRE TOWN’S eating habits. By passing on a few simple healthy recipes and hoping his “students” go on to teach them to a couple of other people. And in the end about two million people will know how to cook. Or something.
Obviously, to do this he needed to head to a scummy-looking northern town where folk left cans of beer and boxes of crisps piled high outside their back doors.
So off we trotted to Rotherham, where the first person we met was Julie Critchlow – the gobby mum who famously passed bags of chips through to her kids when Jamie’s healthy school lunches were introduced at their school.
The chef was amazed when he met her that far from being the work-shy junk-food loving harridan she appeared to be from the news clips, Julie and her mum were actually quite keen on home cooking.
They even made Yorkshire puddings, for goodness sake.
Jamie was obviously terrified of the tough-talking matriarch.
So much so, he completely forgot to bring up the issue of why she was feeding her kids chips through the school fence then. If she was such a devoted fan of healthy home cooking.
Instead he decided that she was going to be some sort of ambassador for the new “mission.”
A couple of volunteers who hadn’t got a clue about cooking agreed to be the first to learn all of Jamie’s new recipes.
They included a well-meaning young mum who was shown giving her kids their “fourth takeaway of the week.” And it was only Tuesday.
She turned out to be quite a natural in the kitchen actually.
Other volunteers weren’t quite so successful though.
One seemed to have trouble with the concept that when a pan was bubbling, that meant it had reached boiling point.
There were also grumbles that all this cooking and teaching lark was just far too time-consuming.
And indeed, when Jamie caught up with his subjects a couple of weeks later, even the successful mum had fallen off the wagon and started buying kebabs again.
Jamie wasn’t put off though – proudly boasting to camera that he had still “enriched her life.”
We’ll see.
Entertaining though this show undoubtedly was, we can’t help being a tad put off by the “look at the thick northerners” tone.
Still, clips of future shows, where Jamie is seen at a football pitch with the crowd crying: “You fat b*****d!” look highly promising.

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