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Feeling at home?
One of my favourite bits in Gourmet Traveler magazine is the column
AA Gill is
away. If you don't read the UK Sunday Times, or the online
version, you might not know that AA Gill is their Food
and TV reviewer. And
he is just as cutting and perceptive as in the GT magazine.
I was prompted to read his review of the new Jamie Oliver
(yet to be seen in Australia), Channel 4 TV show,
Jamie at Home
from a mention in Malcolm Jolley's
Gremolata nnewsletter.
 Jamie's Chanel 4 TV ad
for the show (here
on YouTube) suggests he's taking the mickey, but
Gill doesn't seem to think so.
"In Jamie at Home
(Tuesday, C4), Oliver is looking for a change of culinary
direction, semaphored by a weird and overwrought trailer. He
has moved from campaigning about the real world to proselytising about an Arcadian one; his boundless and
contagious enthusiasm is aimed at knocking up the good life."
"He has gone from urban scooter bum with the pubbable mates
and the pancetta butties to a rural, wide-vowelled lord of
the manor with a garter. It’s an awkward transition. It’s
like something out of PG Wodehouse. The recipes and the
method and the banter are as winning as ever, and he is on
the side of the angels, but it’s less about how we eat and
more about how we dream of eating." |
"It’s aspirational
lifestyle soft porn: the wood-burning oven, the walled
kitchen garden, Mellors in the polytunnel, all organic and
wholesome and Edenish. There is a suspicion that perhaps
Jamie has cashed in the cred for rock-star rural – this is
his concept-album series, the one that goes with the fish
farm and the tweed and the taking up hunting."
The
Channel 4 'microsite' for the show has links to some clips (if you
were in the UK you can download recent episodes for free) along with
gardening hints, sample recipes and viewer feedback. The
reviews on the UK Amazon page for the inevitable series
book, are generally sarcastic or to be generous, dismissive.
Gill's criticism is at another level
When I work out how to download an episode, I'll offer a
comment. There's a clip of him cooking a pasta dish from
the show (here
on a Japanese (?) site)
Fred Harden 24 September 2007/p>
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