10 NOVEMBER 2001, Page 96

Cooking for pleasure

James Delingpole

Bcfore I get on to weighty matters like TV lifestyle programmes and Jamie Oliver, I want to touch briefly on last week's Dispatches, which suggested that if Osama bin Laden were to crash a jumbo jet into Sellafield, the fallout would be the equivalent of 100 Chernobyls. This would mean, presumably, that the whole of the British Isles would be rendered uninhabitable, that most of us would die, our economy would never recover and thousands of years of illustrious history would vanish down the pan.

So perhaps someone can explain the hit afterwards, when a solemn voice-over announced that Britain faced a grim choice between freedom of speech and the safety of its citizens. Now I'm sorry if I sound dim-witted or fascistic here, but I just don't get where the dilemma lies. If the choice is between the rights of a few mad mullahs in Finsbury Park to urge the destruction of the country where they live and the rights of the rest of us not to die horribly, well, I have to say, it strikes me as a bit of a no-brainer.

But anyway to Jamie, about whom I don't think I've Spectated before because

when his first series came out, I'd already interviewed him for a 'he doesn't know it yet but this kid's about to be really famous piece in the Telegraph, and consequently I felt a bit Jamied out. Two series, and a zillion painful Sainsbuly's ads later, I would imagine that the rest of the world feels much the same way. I mean, when was the last time you watched any of his programmes by choice?

The surprising thing is, though, that if you can somehow manage to ignore his irksome ubiquitousness, his programmes are still a real delight. This week he headed to the Highlands to cook for his very good mates. some Scottish fishermen. En route we saw him nearly missing his train; cycling through picturesque scenery asking various folk for the directions to the roving butcher's lorry which — quelle surprise — he found just in time and nipping to the shore to buy some langoustines from two men in a rowing boat just like you always do in Scotland.

OK, so these fishermen had probably never heard of Jamie until his producer called; the narrative was about as believable as Tweenies and I've a suspicion that the cooking didn't all take place in the time the programme pretended it did. But hey, Two Fat Ladies wasn't exactly Das Boot when it came to grimy verisimilitude and that never stopped it being great viewing. And so it is with Jamie. He does rather overuse the word `mate'; and surely, with all that money, he could afford better dress sense and a cooler haircut than his trademark mullet: but Jamie remains a joy to be with. He's warm; he's knowledgeable; his ideas are good; he moves like a pro and he makes you want to get out there and cook.

This week's Faking It (Channel 4, Tuesday), the series in which people attempt to transform themselves convincingly into their polar opposites, demonstrated again why it's the most compulsively watchable makeover programme on TV.

Its past triumphs have included turning a smart country lad into an East End bouncer; a Royal Northern Academy of Music cellist into a club DJ and a painter and decorator into a Young British Artist. This week, it was the turn of a Newcastle burger-van operator who had to become a competition-winning head chef.

Even allowing for the trickery and facttweaking that inevitably goes on when these programmes are made, the man's transformation was genuinely impressive. When he began, he was agonisingly shy and incapable of preparing anything much more complicated than beans on toast. And even on the day before the competition was due to take place, it seemed a foregone conclusion that he was going to lose.

A team of expert advisers included Gordon Ramsay, an acting coach and the head chef from Mezzo had done their best to give him the right attitude (i.e. swaggering arrogance and aggression) and had taught him how to make a starter, main course and pudding really well. But on his final trial run, he blew it so comprehensively — burning his red mullet; failing to give orders to his under-chefs — that I had to get up and run round the room clutching my eyes and going 'Non! Noo!'

And then — God knows how, because I don't think the competition was rigged — he pulled it together and heat three other teams of real professionals. Perhaps the makers of Faking It have been simply very lucky in their choice of changelings and special advisers. But more likely. I fear, is that we live in an age of such artifice that it doesn't really matter whether or not you're good at something any more; what counts is how well you bullshit.

I'm truly sorry, by the way, if I was unfair on either Richard Holmes's Battlefields or the Grenadier Guards in my remarks on the Market Garden episode. What I was hoping to elicit, really, was clarification — which we got from Professor Holmes's letter. But I do promise it's never my intention to upset good people. Only bad ones.