Jamie Oliver versus West Virginia
Although it’s cool to claim you don’t watch much TV, I’ll admit that the boob tube does run a lot chez moi. It’s mainly for passive background noise. Writing and editing professionally is often solitary work, and I often labor from home. I find too much quiet disconcerting, and as I write mostly professionally about music, I also don’t run a lot of music while I’m working. I have to switch between writing and editing other people’s pieces really quickly, and it causes too much of a mental disconnect to be, say, playing metal when you’re examining words about hip-hop on a screen. So I let TV run as a sort of perverse background white noise, usually on Bravo or VH1. Most of the daytime programming plays over and over again and the repetition is kind of soothing if you don’t actually pay attention.
There are, however, a few shows I do actively pay attention to, although it’s mostly to watch them on demand on Hulu, my favorite current form of solitary entertainment media. (I can’t wait until Netflix actually starts streaming on the Wii.) It’s a particularly good time on TV for people who, like me, harbor an equal love for food and the U.K.
On Hulu, I accidentally stumbled one day upon Gordon Ramsay’s
Kitchen Nightmares, which has become weirdly addictive in its highly predictable formula. The Scottish superstar chef descends upon a hapless, failing restaurant in, usually, a mid-size American town, watches it flail, and then introduces a new, meant-to-win formula in the face of a resistant staff.
Like most American reality TV, it focuses more on the behind-the-scenes screaming than, you know, the food, but a skip through my cable company’s listings led me to the original,
BBC version, Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. This one focuses more on the food, and less on theatrics. Some would say it’s more boring, probably, but it’s amazing for anyone who’s fascinated with obscure regional U.K. accents. I once saw an episode whose star Welsh restaurant proprietors actually needed subtitles on its American broadcast.
I’m also fascinated with another newcomer from across the pond trying to tell Americans how to eat, the young Brit
Jamie Oliver. I’ve watched the first four episodes of his new show,
Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution, on Hulu, and so far pity him. He’s trying to bring from-scratch cooking to Huntington, West Virginia, the most obese place in the U.S. (and, thus, the world), and it doesn’t seem the locals are taking kindly to an outsider’s meddling. Still, his cause, getting people to eat real food, is something I’m passionate about, so I hope this winds up following a triumphant story arc. The sad irony, though, is the first episode I watched on Hulu was sponsored by … Hot Pockets.
