Last night's TV reviewed: The Supersizers Go... Wartime; One Life Special: Mum And Me
In The Supersizers Go… Wartime Sue Perkins and Giles Coren began their new series about six historical British diets with an episode set in 1940-45, when, it was usefully explained, “Britain was at war”. This exploration of the nation's wartime diet contained some interesting details. Mock duck, for instance, was made of sausage meat, grated apple and sage, ersatz coffee comprised roasted chicory and dandelions and cooks apparently used paraffin in cakes. It also contained some highly dubious ones, such as that Spam, of which Britain imported 45,000 tonnes, was made by throwing “a whole pig in a blender”, and that Churchill ate and drank “like a lord, which, of course, he was”. Another surprise was how healthy it was. By the end of the week, the pair were significantly fitter than when they started. Perkins, already a willow, had lost two pounds, and Coren three and a half. Which is surprising, considering he stuffed himself in style at a Churchillian lunch in the war rooms under Whitehall. Then again, less surprising remembering he threw up after the cigar.
Before last night’s programme, I hadn’t realised that the officially-imposed wartime diet served two purposes: not just to ration food, but also to build a population that would indeed be able to fight (rather than simply waddle about) on the beaches, landing grounds, fields, streets and hills. In this, not much was left to chance. We were told it was illegal not to eat everything on your plate, however unappetising. Every morning, the Minister of Food would address “the kitchen front” on the wireless – and his message was driven home by adverts featuring such characters as Potato Pete and Doctor Carrot. So wartime food was fairly shared and pretty good for you. You couldn't complain, as opposed, say, to the inhabitants of Rouen, besieged by Henry V: "They ate doggys, they ate cattys, they ate mysse, horses and rattys." Dedicated meat eaters, the French, while the British wartime diet was largely vegetarian. And almost completely tasteless.
Thank god for the British Empire. The Canadians would sent endless parcels of tinned salmon. Tasmania sent cakes so stuffed with fruit that the cake crumbs had to fight for breathing space. Soldiers from Burma brought chocolate, bleached curiously white in the sun. South Africa sent snoek. This was a fish too far. The battle-hardened nation set its face like stone against snoek in any shape or flaming form. Hence this vignette of Sue and Giles at home.
She (talking rather fast): "It is the most extraordinary thing I've ever created. You'll be mesmerised. It's an unspeakable delight."
He (flatly): "It's snoek again, isn't it?"
The story of snoek proves that just because the Ministry of Food worked itself up into a fine froth of enthusiasm, it does not follow that anyone paid any attention. The programme seemed to have swallowed some Ministry of Food propaganda whole. I refuse to believe that anyone cut up stale bread to make Wheatie Bangs (unless you mean bread and milk, a bedtime snack favoured by old dears). Show me a single case of anyone being sent to prison for failing to clear their plate. If that had been so, why were there malodorous pig bins in most streets, designed to take leftover food? Potato sandwiches, cake made with liquid paraffin - are you insane? In a recent issue of the Radio Times, Coren complained: "In the wartime programme we had these old dears in a pub singalong and we had jam jars to drink beer out of and they were saying [assumes old dear voice] 'Oh no, dearie, we never done that!' ... And I was going: 'Well you have done that. We've seen the pictures.' But you can't really use the footage when it's just someone grumbling that you've got it wrong."
In keeping with the demands of our own times, Coren and Perkins were required to dress up in period costume, provide an endless stream of amusing banter and generally put themselves centre-stage. Now and again, their preference for bad jokes over no jokes at all created an unfortunate sense that they were mocking the people of the Forties. Occasionally too, the programme teetered close to caricature. (Surely there must have been some spivs who didn’t dress in wide-lapelled suits and trilbies – and perhaps the odd GI who didn’t come complete with nylons and pineapple chunks.) Then there was the Vision On antics which the director Hugo MacGregor made them perform: mock broom fights, a session in the Home Guard, a pitiful attempt to humiliate some airmen from a US airbase with a laxative-laced cake. As a relative used to say to me, the pair behaved like children of much younger years.
Still if you could ignore the annoying bits, the overall result did painlessly – and sometimes even entertainingly – teach us quite a lot about the wartime diet. Allegra McEvedy had come in to cook for them, scrambling dried eggs and making them a woolton pie, which contained more vegetables than the Sargerson's probably ate in a year. Her chief triumph, though, was an entire dinner of ersatz recipes, including mock duck, mock apricot tart with mock cream and the disgusting-sounding mock crab, which was made out of margarine, dried eggs, vinegar, cheese and salad cream and seemed very likely to result in authentic vomit. "You know when you rock that it's not really a good sign," said Perkins, teetering queasily in her chair after popping a freshly steamed garden snail into her mouth and discovering that it had a bit more crunch than she'd expected. Sadly, they didn't attempt the recipe for baked hedgehog.
It was also a nice idea for Coren to take a break from rationing to sample a typical dinner as eaten by Winston Churchill in the Cabinet War Rooms. The lunch menu, dated 1942, read: native oysters, petite marmite, venison, ice cream and raspberries, Stilton, fruit and nuts, Pol Roger, chardonnay, claret, port, cognac, cigars. Andrew Roberts, a historian there to testify to Churchill's capacity for champagne, mounted a heroic defence of the wine list, working up to a Churchillian crescendo. "My view - and I think the general one - is that if Winston Churchill during the second world war didn't have the right to drink 1870 brandy, then who the hell in history ever had that right?" Having emerged on the other side of the feast Coren duly pronounced himself “trolleyed”. The general view in most boozers at the time, when Churchill called on us to fight on the beaches, was that he'd been at the bottle again. It was partly the combative content and partly his characteristic slurred delivery. It never occurred to me until now that they might have be right.
Nowadays many TV cooking programmes seem to me merely masturbatory. Celebrity chefs play with their food. Dishes, described as witty and sexy, are an exercise in tickling tastebuds and nothing to do with nourishment. In belt-tightening times - and they come and go - food is not funny. Morgan Spurlock, incidentally, should consider a breach of copyright action.
Sue Bourne’s last television film was My Street, in which she had the brilliantly simple idea of finding out about her own neighbours. In Mum and Me (BBC1), she moved even closer to home, by tackling her mother’s Alzheimer’s disease. “The dead don't care” is a viable justification for saying what you want - especially the truth - about someone no longer with you. But what if the someone no longer with you, at the same time, still is? Do the Alzheimec care? Bourne must at some level have thought they did. For she showed her mother her film before BBC One showed it to us as a One Life Special. Whether Ethel Bourne, the mum and Alzheimer's victim in question, had the power of veto is not clear.
"I wanted to make a film that was jolly and uplifting about Alzheimer's," said Bourne. Yes, well, we can file that one alongside the laugh-a-minute account of terminal bowel cancer and the crack-'em-up account of 9/11, I thought, but oddly enough she very nearly managed it, helped towards her unlikely goal by the bracketing generations of her own family. Her daughter, Holly, got a joint credit, for holding the camera and coming along on many of the filming trips, but it was her mother who did the real donkey work, being possessed of a sudden, eruptive laugh that could take the chill off even the most melancholy scene. "That's not your dad," said an exasperated Sue, after Ethel had failed to identify a dashing figure in a bedside photograph, "that's your bloody husband, Mum, that you were married to for 49 years." "Oh," replied Ethel, "that's why he's so familiar." And then she doubled up in hilarity at her own moth-eaten memory.
So we began with the scene in which Ethel sat down to view the completed film and ended with one in which she pronounced the documentary admirable, and assured her daughter that there was nothing she wanted removed from it. It was a way of incorporating a release form into the fabric of the film itself, and if it occurred to you that an Alzheimer's patient might not really be in any condition to give informed consent, it occurred not long after that she wouldn't remember any indignity for very long anyway. This couldn't entirely remove the discomfort from some humiliatingly intimate scenes – in which Ethel wet herself and had to be cleaned up in front of camera – but it's hard to see how the film could have given a true account of the sorrows of Alzheimer's without them. And the fact that Sue and Ethel chuckled away together in the middle of replacing a soiled incontinence pad proved that there were very few ordeals that couldn't be softened by a little laughter.
It wasn't all fun. Ethel became tetchy and distressed when her daughter mentioned that her care- home bedroom was beginning to smell a little. "It's really quite devastating to be called a smelly old bitch," she snapped, a sense of injured dignity rearing up suddenly. And Sue included a nasty bickering row with her mother after a weekend break had given both of them a little too much of each other's company. But there was something very touching about the relationship of all three women in the better times, loving enough to bear the exchange of remarks that would have been insults in any other context but here came across as shared jokes. "Lots of people love you, Mum," Sue insisted after her mother had complained of her isolation, "they just don't want you to come and stay." Ethel roared.
There were, of couse, plenty of questions thrown up by the film, which was as horribly gripping as it was amateurishly filmed. Many of them concerned the illness itself. Why could Ethel securely lock on to the fact that Holly was her granddaughter but not that Sue was her daughter? Did Ethel really, as she claimed, live for Sue's monthly visits to her care home in Ayrshire or did she in fact live in a continual, unreflecting present? Most of all, you wanted to know if the disease had limited not just her memory (she even forgot how to blow her nose) but her emotional range. Every time Sue visited, Ethel greeted her with smiles and laughter, except once when the laughter turned to sobs. Sometimes laughter is not the best medicine, merely the best hiding place.
A subsidiary question is why Sue made the film, and I fear that the answer can only be that a documentary-maker is as greedy for material as any other artist or journalist. The three-year project also, presumably, made the Scottish visits less boring. To her credit, Sue was as ruthlessly clear-eyed about herself as she was about her mother. It would have been easy for her to have left out the moment she turned on her mother and called her stupid. The film was a lot about her. When she had a mastectomy she could not tell her mother for fear of worrying her. She missed that. A parent is a parent even when you have to parent them. Together, these women failed to make a jolly and uplifting film about Alzheimer's. They made something richer. Which just leaves the traditional question of whether the exercise was intrusive. My answer, I’m afraid, would be “sometimes” – especially when we got to see Ethel’s incontinence in such unsparing detail. Certainly, I suspect I can’t be the only viewer who finished the programme hoping that, if I ever end up like Ethel, none of the children in my family has grown up to become a film-maker.
In The Supersizers Go… Wartime Sue Perkins and Giles Coren began their new series about six historical British diets with an episode set in 1940-45, when, it was usefully explained, “Britain was at war”. This exploration of the nation's wartime diet contained some interesting details. Mock duck, for instance, was made of sausage meat, grated apple and sage, ersatz coffee comprised roasted chicory and dandelions and cooks apparently used paraffin in cakes. It also contained some highly dubious ones, such as that Spam, of which Britain imported 45,000 tonnes, was made by throwing “a whole pig in a blender”, and that Churchill ate and drank “like a lord, which, of course, he was”. Another surprise was how healthy it was. By the end of the week, the pair were significantly fitter than when they started. Perkins, already a willow, had lost two pounds, and Coren three and a half. Which is surprising, considering he stuffed himself in style at a Churchillian lunch in the war rooms under Whitehall. Then again, less surprising remembering he threw up after the cigar.
Before last night’s programme, I hadn’t realised that the officially-imposed wartime diet served two purposes: not just to ration food, but also to build a population that would indeed be able to fight (rather than simply waddle about) on the beaches, landing grounds, fields, streets and hills. In this, not much was left to chance. We were told it was illegal not to eat everything on your plate, however unappetising. Every morning, the Minister of Food would address “the kitchen front” on the wireless – and his message was driven home by adverts featuring such characters as Potato Pete and Doctor Carrot. So wartime food was fairly shared and pretty good for you. You couldn't complain, as opposed, say, to the inhabitants of Rouen, besieged by Henry V: "They ate doggys, they ate cattys, they ate mysse, horses and rattys." Dedicated meat eaters, the French, while the British wartime diet was largely vegetarian. And almost completely tasteless.
Thank god for the British Empire. The Canadians would sent endless parcels of tinned salmon. Tasmania sent cakes so stuffed with fruit that the cake crumbs had to fight for breathing space. Soldiers from Burma brought chocolate, bleached curiously white in the sun. South Africa sent snoek. This was a fish too far. The battle-hardened nation set its face like stone against snoek in any shape or flaming form. Hence this vignette of Sue and Giles at home.
She (talking rather fast): "It is the most extraordinary thing I've ever created. You'll be mesmerised. It's an unspeakable delight."
He (flatly): "It's snoek again, isn't it?"
The story of snoek proves that just because the Ministry of Food worked itself up into a fine froth of enthusiasm, it does not follow that anyone paid any attention. The programme seemed to have swallowed some Ministry of Food propaganda whole. I refuse to believe that anyone cut up stale bread to make Wheatie Bangs (unless you mean bread and milk, a bedtime snack favoured by old dears). Show me a single case of anyone being sent to prison for failing to clear their plate. If that had been so, why were there malodorous pig bins in most streets, designed to take leftover food? Potato sandwiches, cake made with liquid paraffin - are you insane? In a recent issue of the Radio Times, Coren complained: "In the wartime programme we had these old dears in a pub singalong and we had jam jars to drink beer out of and they were saying [assumes old dear voice] 'Oh no, dearie, we never done that!' ... And I was going: 'Well you have done that. We've seen the pictures.' But you can't really use the footage when it's just someone grumbling that you've got it wrong."
In keeping with the demands of our own times, Coren and Perkins were required to dress up in period costume, provide an endless stream of amusing banter and generally put themselves centre-stage. Now and again, their preference for bad jokes over no jokes at all created an unfortunate sense that they were mocking the people of the Forties. Occasionally too, the programme teetered close to caricature. (Surely there must have been some spivs who didn’t dress in wide-lapelled suits and trilbies – and perhaps the odd GI who didn’t come complete with nylons and pineapple chunks.) Then there was the Vision On antics which the director Hugo MacGregor made them perform: mock broom fights, a session in the Home Guard, a pitiful attempt to humiliate some airmen from a US airbase with a laxative-laced cake. As a relative used to say to me, the pair behaved like children of much younger years.
Still if you could ignore the annoying bits, the overall result did painlessly – and sometimes even entertainingly – teach us quite a lot about the wartime diet. Allegra McEvedy had come in to cook for them, scrambling dried eggs and making them a woolton pie, which contained more vegetables than the Sargerson's probably ate in a year. Her chief triumph, though, was an entire dinner of ersatz recipes, including mock duck, mock apricot tart with mock cream and the disgusting-sounding mock crab, which was made out of margarine, dried eggs, vinegar, cheese and salad cream and seemed very likely to result in authentic vomit. "You know when you rock that it's not really a good sign," said Perkins, teetering queasily in her chair after popping a freshly steamed garden snail into her mouth and discovering that it had a bit more crunch than she'd expected. Sadly, they didn't attempt the recipe for baked hedgehog.
It was also a nice idea for Coren to take a break from rationing to sample a typical dinner as eaten by Winston Churchill in the Cabinet War Rooms. The lunch menu, dated 1942, read: native oysters, petite marmite, venison, ice cream and raspberries, Stilton, fruit and nuts, Pol Roger, chardonnay, claret, port, cognac, cigars. Andrew Roberts, a historian there to testify to Churchill's capacity for champagne, mounted a heroic defence of the wine list, working up to a Churchillian crescendo. "My view - and I think the general one - is that if Winston Churchill during the second world war didn't have the right to drink 1870 brandy, then who the hell in history ever had that right?" Having emerged on the other side of the feast Coren duly pronounced himself “trolleyed”. The general view in most boozers at the time, when Churchill called on us to fight on the beaches, was that he'd been at the bottle again. It was partly the combative content and partly his characteristic slurred delivery. It never occurred to me until now that they might have be right.
Nowadays many TV cooking programmes seem to me merely masturbatory. Celebrity chefs play with their food. Dishes, described as witty and sexy, are an exercise in tickling tastebuds and nothing to do with nourishment. In belt-tightening times - and they come and go - food is not funny. Morgan Spurlock, incidentally, should consider a breach of copyright action.
Sue Bourne’s last television film was My Street, in which she had the brilliantly simple idea of finding out about her own neighbours. In Mum and Me (BBC1), she moved even closer to home, by tackling her mother’s Alzheimer’s disease. “The dead don't care” is a viable justification for saying what you want - especially the truth - about someone no longer with you. But what if the someone no longer with you, at the same time, still is? Do the Alzheimec care? Bourne must at some level have thought they did. For she showed her mother her film before BBC One showed it to us as a One Life Special. Whether Ethel Bourne, the mum and Alzheimer's victim in question, had the power of veto is not clear.
"I wanted to make a film that was jolly and uplifting about Alzheimer's," said Bourne. Yes, well, we can file that one alongside the laugh-a-minute account of terminal bowel cancer and the crack-'em-up account of 9/11, I thought, but oddly enough she very nearly managed it, helped towards her unlikely goal by the bracketing generations of her own family. Her daughter, Holly, got a joint credit, for holding the camera and coming along on many of the filming trips, but it was her mother who did the real donkey work, being possessed of a sudden, eruptive laugh that could take the chill off even the most melancholy scene. "That's not your dad," said an exasperated Sue, after Ethel had failed to identify a dashing figure in a bedside photograph, "that's your bloody husband, Mum, that you were married to for 49 years." "Oh," replied Ethel, "that's why he's so familiar." And then she doubled up in hilarity at her own moth-eaten memory.
So we began with the scene in which Ethel sat down to view the completed film and ended with one in which she pronounced the documentary admirable, and assured her daughter that there was nothing she wanted removed from it. It was a way of incorporating a release form into the fabric of the film itself, and if it occurred to you that an Alzheimer's patient might not really be in any condition to give informed consent, it occurred not long after that she wouldn't remember any indignity for very long anyway. This couldn't entirely remove the discomfort from some humiliatingly intimate scenes – in which Ethel wet herself and had to be cleaned up in front of camera – but it's hard to see how the film could have given a true account of the sorrows of Alzheimer's without them. And the fact that Sue and Ethel chuckled away together in the middle of replacing a soiled incontinence pad proved that there were very few ordeals that couldn't be softened by a little laughter.
It wasn't all fun. Ethel became tetchy and distressed when her daughter mentioned that her care- home bedroom was beginning to smell a little. "It's really quite devastating to be called a smelly old bitch," she snapped, a sense of injured dignity rearing up suddenly. And Sue included a nasty bickering row with her mother after a weekend break had given both of them a little too much of each other's company. But there was something very touching about the relationship of all three women in the better times, loving enough to bear the exchange of remarks that would have been insults in any other context but here came across as shared jokes. "Lots of people love you, Mum," Sue insisted after her mother had complained of her isolation, "they just don't want you to come and stay." Ethel roared.
There were, of couse, plenty of questions thrown up by the film, which was as horribly gripping as it was amateurishly filmed. Many of them concerned the illness itself. Why could Ethel securely lock on to the fact that Holly was her granddaughter but not that Sue was her daughter? Did Ethel really, as she claimed, live for Sue's monthly visits to her care home in Ayrshire or did she in fact live in a continual, unreflecting present? Most of all, you wanted to know if the disease had limited not just her memory (she even forgot how to blow her nose) but her emotional range. Every time Sue visited, Ethel greeted her with smiles and laughter, except once when the laughter turned to sobs. Sometimes laughter is not the best medicine, merely the best hiding place.
A subsidiary question is why Sue made the film, and I fear that the answer can only be that a documentary-maker is as greedy for material as any other artist or journalist. The three-year project also, presumably, made the Scottish visits less boring. To her credit, Sue was as ruthlessly clear-eyed about herself as she was about her mother. It would have been easy for her to have left out the moment she turned on her mother and called her stupid. The film was a lot about her. When she had a mastectomy she could not tell her mother for fear of worrying her. She missed that. A parent is a parent even when you have to parent them. Together, these women failed to make a jolly and uplifting film about Alzheimer's. They made something richer. Which just leaves the traditional question of whether the exercise was intrusive. My answer, I’m afraid, would be “sometimes” – especially when we got to see Ethel’s incontinence in such unsparing detail. Certainly, I suspect I can’t be the only viewer who finished the programme hoping that, if I ever end up like Ethel, none of the children in my family has grown up to become a film-maker.
