Heading Out; Food, Glorious Food
BBC2; ITV
Sue Perkins, the one with dark hair from The Great British Bake Off, has written a sitcom, in which she also stars. It’s called Heading Out (Tuesdays, 10pm), and it’s about a 40-yearold vet who is too scared to tell her nice middle- class parents – and you really don’t get nicer or more middle-class than Harriet Walter, who plays her mum – that she is a lesbian.
Are you convinced by this set-up? I’m not. I mean, a friend of mine came out when we were 18, in Sheffield, in 1987, at a school where you were basically a social outcast if you didn’t look and act like Shirley from Wham! Would a funny and assertive 40- year-old vet in the south of England in 2013 who isn’t married (I mean to a man), and doesn’t have children, really find it so terribly hard to say the words “I’m gay” to her loving, if somewhat conventional (and, er, possibly blind), parents? I don’t think she would, though do feel free to correct me if I’m wrong. It may be that I am just too damned liberal for my own good.
It’s a pity the set-up is so dodgy, because it’s quite funny otherwise. The flip side of my extreme liberality is an urgent desire to laugh at people who are overly sentimental about animals – I’m a real Jekyll and Hyde type, on the sly – so jokes about dead cats and pet crematoria are, alas, right up my street. Sara (Perkins) is a superbly hopeless vet: the kind who keeps a stiff moggy in her fridge – it’s a long story – and who can barely hide her derision when soppy owners from the Liz Jones school of feline husbandry start going on about arnica and Rescue Remedy.
The show has a nice supporting cast, too: Nicola Walker (Spooks) plays Justine, Sara’s friend on the netball team, and Joanna Scanlon (The Thick of It) is the batty life coach who is going to help her pluck up the courage to tell her parents that her new boyfriend is in fact a girlfriend. Maybe, then, it’ll settle down as it goes along; maybe it’ll become so hilariously funny I’ll be able to forget all about the 40-year-old closeted lesbian aspect of it. I hope so, because Perkins is a good sort.
Certainly, she seems a better sort than Carol Vorderman, the presenter of Food, Glorious Food (Wednesdays 8pm), ITV’s dimwitted and pathetic attempt to grab a slice of Bake Off’s audience. Oh, man, this show is bad. What, I wonder, do I most despise about it? Is it that the winner’s dish – any recipe will do, sweet or savoury, and the more ghastlysounding the better – will be developed and sold by Marks & Spencer at a time when our faith in ready meals has reached rock bottom? Or is it the fact that one of the “expert” judges, the charmless Anne Harrison of the WI, admitted in the first episode that she did not know what a Staffordshire oatcake was? Or maybe it’s the realisation that her colleague Tom Parker Bowles doesn’t seem embarrassed to be described as “food-writing royalty”?
It has no drama and no focus; the standard is so desperately low, it’s patently obvious who is going to win each round and, since anything goes, you have pheasant paprikash competing against Pimm’s jelly and Welsh cawl, which is just dumb. The producers seem to have chosen contestants mostly so we can laugh at them, Britain’s Got Talent style (Simon Cowell’s company makes this series). In the first episode, we had a mother and son who wear Victorian dress full-time and apparently without irony; a woman who makes fermented cabbage by crushing it beneath her bare feet; and a woman who thinks that Loyd Grossman, another of the judges, looks like Sean Connery. (And while we’re on the subject of Grossman, he appears to have insisted his OBE be added to his name on the credits, which isn’t very cool at all.)
As for Vorderman, though she has swapped her Galaxy dress for something a little more Cath Kidston, she appears to be about as interested in cooking as I am in who wins this shameless, muddled rip-off. Honestly, I would rather wear Anne Harrison’s giant purple body warmer to lunch at Claridge’s with Brad Pitt than watch this show again.
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