Britain's Poshest Ready Meal? review: how the middle classes fell for Charlie Bigham
I don't consider myself remotely posh but I am partial to a Charlie Bigham fish pie when time is tight and I haven't got time to whip up braised octopus with sour cherries and rosemary smoke from scratch.
So I was looking forward to a poke around the Bigham Somerset HQ to see how the one-time exec turned camper van traveller has spun an enquiring palate into a big-money ready-meal business. But 10 minutes into Charlie Bigham: Britain's Poshest Ready Meal? (Channel 5) I was checking the ingredients on the tin: this documentary title was click-bite with a heavy dollop of sauce on the side.
For once food critic Jimmy Famurewa had declared, via a blind tasting, that Bigham's Chicken Tikka Masala was, despite its £6 price tag, worth shelling out for compared to its more budget-conscious competition, the Bigham element of this lightweight nibble of a look at Britain's ready-meal habit all but disappeared.
What you got instead was a taster menu of hastily assembled titbits on the ready-meal theme with very little in the way of solid facts to sink your teeth into. Having a woman from Wigan cooking her own macaroni cheese from scratch to prove you can do it cheaper – getaway – was about as penetrating as the research got.
Admittedly the endless shots of food prep as we were treated to product-placement tours of Cook and Gousto kitchens couldn't help but make me feel peckish and there was the odd slice of info, however reheated, to mull over. High-end ready meals, it turns out, are not the nutritious choice, given their contents. The salt and other naughty stuff is what makes them taste better.
But overall this documentary felt like an idea that had been pitched in a pressure-cooker TV meeting, hooking the commissioning editor with a juicy title, which then went up in smoke in the making. As for the big question: is Charlie Bigham Britain's poshest ready meal? After this indigestible heap of thrown together leftovers I still have no idea.
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