TV Review - Cook Yourself Thin vs Celebrity Recipes, Channel 4, Tuesday, 8pm

What is the best way to lose weight? Hands up. You, at the back there. What’s that? A balanced diet with exercise? Good good good. That’s a very sensible answer. How about you… lady in the red sweater… yes… okay… not eating as much… moderation is an excellent way to avoid piling the pounds on. Good work class. Next week, stating the obvious.

Recently, TV has become a very concerned friend. A concerned friend that hasn’t got anything better to do than pry around in people’s lives as they don’t have one themselves. They’ve finished putting our shelves up, built a weird extension and now, they want to help us with our chewing. Nothing wrong with that I suppose… unless it feels like it’s roughly half of your entire day. With that, we got Cook Yourself Thin vs Celebrity Recipes (Channel 4, Tuesday, 8pm).

Now, in the past, I’ve been less than kind to the Cook Yourself Thin girls. They were responsible for my 3rd worst programme of 2007. In short, I felt… and feel… that they are patronising and out of touch with the world. So, last night, taking on celebrity recipes, I was sure I was going to kick the cathode out of my gogglebox.

These calorie-conscious cookery shows are never fun. They focus on the wrong things. Instead of telling women that it’s absolutely fine to have a bit of meat on ‘em, they simply gun for the weight loss. I’ve said it before, but if this show was called Cook Yourself Happy, I’d be fine about it… but it’s the fact that the show’s title implies that weight NEEDS to be lost. Anyway, enough of my sixth form politics… what was the show like?

The girls put the recipes of celebrity chefs to the test. A test that wants to know what these recipes are doing to waistlines. Of course, the girls want you to be shocked at the amount of calories and all that… I mean, who would have guessed that really tasty food usually includes butter, cheese, sugar and cream? It’s a bit obvious isn’t it? That’s why they’re naughty but nice. The CYT ladies want to reduce the calories drastically, but still match these sleb chef dishes on taste. What is annoying is that they choose books that are simply recipes. Why didn’t they do a useful experiment by exposing the badness contained in dieting recipe books or something?

Going up against a bunch of recipes that aren’t claiming to be good for you is bad form I think. It feels like they’re having a go at someone for something they simply haven’t done. The whole experiment is flawed. It’s like sending an apple up against a cream cake in a ‘which is the healthiest sweet thing’ test. They’re constantly coming from the wrong angle. Don’t try to show off… tell people that dieting ready meals are rubbish compared to what you make… because that’s clearly true.

The point of the programme was to show that you can cut the calories and still have food that tastes as good. Right? Wrong. When the gals go up against a famous French chef Jean Christophe Novelli in a dish-to-dish head-to-head, the one with all the cream, butter and cheese in wins hands down. 18 votes to 1 if I remember rightly. Begrudgingly, I have to hand it to the show for keeping this segment of the show in… that’s pretty brave.

Anyway, as ever, this show was pretty poor, but in saying that, all the things that really got my dander up last year have seemingly been curbed a little. Not once did I feel a flash of fury… okay… I was annoyed… but I wasn’t. I don’t think this show will be on the box for very long as it’s ill-conceived and misguided. In the battle for home cooking and the like, people will invariably run to Nigella and Jamie Oliver, leaving this show redundant.