Main • Fiction • About • Contact • News • Extras
I jest, of course. It was very easy to get one's teeth into Channel 4's The British Miracle Meat. (First broadcast, 24/07/2023 at 20.30 BST.) Its message, delivered via sledgehammer, was only too clear, and that, ironically, was the problem.
First, a recap. It’s a parody of those 'isn't food tech wonderful?' shows that Channel 4 loves so much. It features Gregg Wallace, sending himself up as precisely the sort of person who'd see a Wotsit being made, and go "FUCK ME! THAT'S AMAZING!!!" Wallace is an old hand at this. He’s all the more effective because he does it as a day job.
Yet the factory isn't making Wotsits. It's growing cultured human flesh, extracted from the poor and desperate. It's cheap, tasty and just what Britain needs to counter its Cost Of Living Crisis...
Geddit? The credits even cite Jonathan Swift for inspiration. Everything was invented in the 18th Century, as they like to say.
Before I put the beast to rest with a captive bolt gun, however, let’s look at what it does well. First, the cast. There is Stephen Chapman as a factory worker who's more than happy to both eat and be eaten. He has a young family to feed, after all. It's the friendliness and air of level-headedness that makes his scene so... Creepy.
Special credit should also be given to Julianna Kurokawa. She plays a slick corporate exec, tongue adrip with honeyed words to make you fall in line with the abominable. Under it all lurks something, or worse, some one far more sinister and ghoulish. "Pain-subjective" she frowns with faint menace when anything as gauche as ethics enters the chat. Like the late, great Sid Haig, Kurokawa knows how to act with her big, hungry eyes and teeth. She's TINA in human form. The corporate informality of evil.
Greg Wallace himself does a good job, moving from a blithe embrace of mass produced cannibalism to an ever growing sense of dread. It’s an only too convincing depiction of how people accept atrocity, all in easy to swallow (ahem) steps, until the horror is too much to bear. By then, it's too late, and we're all as tainted as the next ogre. That ominous line "you little sausage" chills the blood. As Michael Rosen might have said, anthropophagy arrives as your friend...
Finally, IRL celebrity chef Michael Roux Jr is all too blasé about cooking and eating human meat. In one scene, in-between mouthfuls, he casually discusses the 'terroir' and how to produce the best man-flesh for the dinner table. Would you believe it? Being out of a job and stuck on a sofa does wonders for your flavour.
One might ponder the wisdom of a successful chef doing something like this. All of a sudden, the Braised Gem Lettuce looks much less violent, and the Carré d’Agneau's fave band is now The Cro Mags. Despite that, all PR is good PR, as per the old cliché. But it takes gall to do this. As troll jobs by Michelin Star chefs go, it's quite the thing to behold.
And, best of all, the show never lets go of its breezy, slick and superficially bouncy air... All the while, abominations grow fat in nutrient tanks. Bits of old granny get carved off in exchange for a pittance. And the public just wants more, and more, and more. It really does work as a satire at points, mainly because it just uses the format, framing and tone of the less grisly food shows it's sending up.
Still, The British Miracle Meat is a failure. In part, because it suffers from what ails most British satire, where it feels awfully pleased with itself, despite being in truth rather superficial. There are some half-arsed pro-veganism and anti-capitalism jabs here and there. Sadly, they (ahem) lack bite or commitment.
Yet things really fall apart when the show decides to make it blatant for the thickies at home. Cue unnecessary shots of screaming, frightened children and a pious sermon from Wallace. True, Swift did the same thing at the end of A Modest Proposal.
For all that, while satire needs that "Swiftian Wink", sometimes it needs to just stew in its own malevolence and let the audience think for itself. Good satire provokes, rather than instructs. Unless, of course, what you're really looking for is a really sarcastic scoutmaster to tell you off for half an hour. Or what’s left of Charlie Brooker.
In that sense then, as a mockumentary, TBMM pales in comparison to 1992's Ghostwatch and 2001's Brasseye Special. All are shocking in what they do and how they subvert conventions in order to do it. All have children in peril as a major theme. They all, in their own way, spoof the whole silly notion of celebrity, whether the ‘slebs are in on it or not.
Yet what elevated Ghostwatch and Brasseye is how they pointed their fingers at their audiences, mocking their cant and hubris. There's a reason why they received storms of complaints, compared to TBMM's relative ripple of outrage. Or, for that matter, the mostly flattering response the media gave it.
By contrast, TBMM, portrays the public as victims of an awful government and big business, shying away from asking how all this came to be in the first place. Well, the public voted the Tories in non-stop for the last 13 years, and they voted for Brexit. They have enabled this. They made themselves edible.
For its part, TBMM desperately wants to makes its case. But it even more desperately wants us to like it, and think it's scary and funny, and make us feel awfully clever at the same time for being in on the joke. And that's why it fails. Anyone for tofu?
[ENDS]
© Alexander Hay 2022-2024