Ready Meals: What They Really Mean for You, review: flavourless look at the British food industry
Gregg Wallace may have consciously uncoupled with the British Broadcasting Corporation, but his spirit is alive and well within the corridors of W1A. Ready Meals: What They Really Mean for You (BBC One) was ostensibly a cheap and cheerful magazine show about the British food industry's attempts to reach net zero by 2050. If that particular ready meal sounds a bit dry, the BBC agreed. Pouring on the Inside the Factory gravy was its Climate Editor Justin Rowlatt, who eagerly stepped into Wallace's hairnet.
'Wow!' he said at some fairly large, stainless steel machines. 'It is massive!' he hollered at a Tesco distribution centre in Avonmouth. 'Magical!' he trilled at a production line. 'Liam is going to unleash some of his state-of-the-art food processing machines,' he drooled at a man called Liam, who was pressing a button. 'It looks like a huge insect, doesn't it?' he quipped at a combine harvester. If Wallace was watching at home, he could only have marvelled at the craft.
Dull as it undoubtedly was, the programme had a serious point to make, but seemed ambivalent about what exactly it was. Rowlatt did a good job of holding obfuscating industry spokespeople to account – Are the supermarkets all talk? Do farmers just need to accept we must eat less meat? – but this sort of tech-business documentary always falls into the same trap.
In highlighting some of the innovations – synthetic meat made from a few pig cells or a palm oil alternative that could save countless hectares of rainforest – the show left you with an artificial sense that everyone was okay. How innovative we humans are! No need to change course too much – the boffins are onto it.
It all felt a little like an Open University video that would have its students' eyelids sagging. 'I am a woman who loves a robot,' said scientist Fran Scott, which briefly threatened a far more exciting programme. Alas, she was talking about a robotic arm that could make soup. Tesco and Multivac got some good free publicity out of it, but this was a ready meal short of some seasoning.
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