Jamie Oliver: It’s That Man Again
“Please sir, can I have some more?”
Seven words TV cook Jamie Oliver will be unlikely to ever hear from me. Not that I imagine he cares much either way.
Yes, Jamie's back on Channel 4, if indeed he ever went away, appearing (in the words of Bond villain Hugo Drax) with “the tedious inevitability of an unloved season”.
Obviously, he has his admirers, but I can't quite understand why Ch4 keep coming back to the Oliver well, considering how many other telegenic hash slingers there must be out there.
Whatever charm Jamie possesses has long escaped me, partly a consequence of his ubiquity, much in the way Lucy Worsley was initially an enjoyably eccentric presence until the BBC went ‘Coo Coo for Cocoa Puffs’ on the cosplaying historian.
What certainly irks some (especially former employees) are the circumstances surrounding the collapse of Oliver’s restaurant empire and the resultant mass redundancies.
His maudlin self-pity over the sorry affair, blame-casting, narcissism, and ostentatious displays of wealth (as evidenced by his £6m purchase of 70-acre country retreat Spains Hall as his eateries were being shuttered) surely could have rung at least a few alarm bells at Ch4 HQ.
Oliver’s vaunted empathy with the UK’s underclasses smacks of gaslighting when his greatest recent concern appears to be rebuilding the moat around Grade I listed Spains Hall.
The TV cook seems to have taken to heart two overused phrases for inspiration during the pandemic:
'Chaos is a ladder'
(GoT's Littlefinger aka Pete Baelish)
And
'Never waste a good crisis'
(Winston Churchill)
Oliver certainly has taken advantage of the global pandemic to coin it in with Lockdown-themed TV shows and yet more cookbooks, publication (RRP £26 for the latest tome) timed of course around the new show; cheers Ch4.
What took the biscuit for me, was the palaver surrounding Jamie’s first COVID-19 cash-in series, Keep Cooking and Carry On.
Something about his stated reasons for indenturing wife Jools and brood to film his lockdown series on a mobile phone didn’t pass the smell test for me.
Surely someone from Jamie Oliver Productions could have dropped a Red camera off by the gates of his Elizabethan mansion. If there wasn't one already lying around on the compound? With a simple instruction pamphlet of course.
Still, filming on mobiles must have saved Jamie a decent wodge of cash that would otherwise gone on employees, especially if Ch4 paid the same tariff for the series.
Oliver (probably unconsciously?) flipped the bird at what would have been the production crew, declaring that his taking the helm on the series meant that “a three-month job” was accomplished “in three days”.
JO presumably also thought the appearance of suffering would be increased by adopting the exhausted manner of a prisoner working on an escape tunnel from a WWII German POW camp.
Oh, the humanity.
For his new series Jamie Oliver: Together (w/t) he will be
“opening his home to some of the frontline heroes of the pandemic, from NHS staff to delivery drivers, food growers and vital service providers.”
I wonder who will win the Golden Ticket to the soirées? Lime-juice and olive oil drenched ‘grub’ on the menu, accompanied by the strains of Ocean Colour Scene, Reef and Toploader? Pukka.
Will Oliver also be including his own pals this time? If so, it would make a change from the ‘pretend friends’ allegedly used in his first BBC series, The Naked Chef (1999-2001).
