Master chefs or off the boil?

TV REVIEW: Jamie's American Food RevolutionChannel 4, Monday Ramsay's Best RestaurantChannel 4, Tuesday FoodChannel 4, Tuesday FreefallRTÉ1, Monday NewsTV3, Tuesday

IT TOOK A SNARLING lunch lady named Alice and a perma-tanned radio jock to get Jamie Oliver blubbing like a baby. "I'm a good person, I am," he cried at the end of the first episode of Jamie's American Food Revolution, his famous confidence shot to pieces. In his new series he's on a mission to improve the astonishingly bad diets of the people of Huntington, West Virginia, the most unhealthy city in the US – which is some boast considering the competition. He's aiming to replicate his UK school-dinners makeover experiment – remember Turkey Twizzlers? – but on a grander scale. Taking on a whole town full of fatties and deep-fat fryers proved to be a bigger challenge than he expected, and he wasn't greeted with the loved-up star-struck open arms he's used to.

“Who made you God?” sniped a radio DJ during what was supposed to be a promotional interview. Half the adults in Huntington are obese, levels of heart disease and diabetes are the highest in the US and children are likely to live shorter lives than their parents. To get a handle on the town’s diet he started in a primary-school canteen where the kids get both breakfast and lunch. In a country where a president (Reagan) declared ketchup a vegetable and chips are counted as one of your five a day, the uphill struggle he’s facing in this ambitious series became clear. Holding up a handful of tomatoes, he asked the nine-year-olds what they were. No clue. Same with potatoes. Breakfast in the school canteen was pizza; lunch was nuggets with instant potatoes and as much sugary chocolate milk as you could drink.

It’s going to be fun watching him turn that around. Especially when Alice, the boss lady in the canteen and custodian of what Oliver described as “a freezer that’s an Aladdin’s cave of processed crap”, hates every inch of someone she made very clear she thinks is an uppity know-it-all Brit.

The natives weren’t thrilled when midway through the first episode the local newspaper carried a front-page story of how Oliver had been telling them back in Blighty just how ignorant and stupid he found the Yanks. Watching him as he wormed his way out of that one with an abject apology to the lunch ladies was compelling: it was one of many diversions off the standard makeover script that made this look like genuine reality TV. It’s not hard to see why the series was met with such acclaim and controversy when it aired in the US last March.

ANOTHER STAR CHEF, Gordon Ramsay, is back with a new series of Ramsay's Best Restaurant, but the fight has gone out of him. Maybe it's the much-publicised damage the recession has done to his business, but now when he comes across inept chefs and hopeless maitre d's he's kind and forgiving, nice even – and that's not what viewers sign up for in a Ramsay show. The first episode featured two Italian restaurants, one in London, one in Bristol, and maybe it was fascinating for professionals in the hospitality business, but for civilians it was about as interesting as watching a training video for apprentice actuaries.

“You only learn from the negatives, not the positives,” said the new laid-back Ramsay, his mop of blond highlights shimmering under the lights – the old shouty, potty-mouthed version wouldn’t have said that.

THE THIRD NEWfoodie programme this week, Food(well, really a food-themed consumer series), began with a challenging scene for a vegetarian: the restaurant critic Jay Rayner arrived in the studio (which for some reason – possibly self-conscious hipness – is a barn) with half a pig slung over his shoulder, blood dripping and all. The audience groaned. "It's dead, people," he said. The butcher then expertly carved the little porker into 34 cuts, the point being that there's more to eat on a pig than a few chops, a Sunday roast and a string of sausages. Then Rayner's co-presenter, Revinder Bhogal, cooked a pork cheek ragout, which sounds horrible and looked worse and takes four hours in the oven, so you wouldn't want to be starving, but it had the audience in raptures. It was all quite pleased with itself.

Then came predictable items on the sugar content in fruit juices – “type-two diabetes in a glass,” said Rayner – food miles; the difference between spreads and real butter; and a disgusting (and pointless unless maggots are your thing) “how bold can I be with mould?” item on the time it takes for meat to rot. They packed a lot into the hour, though somehow the hour dragged.

LAST SATURDAYin this paper Alan Dukes, the chairman of Anglo Irish Bank, described RTÉ's series Freefallas "crap television, with loads of moody shots of cars and tunnels, speeded up and slowed down". No, Alan: Freefallwas excellent and timely TV. Yes, there were too many arty shots of Dublin at night, but it's exceeding difficult to put a visual on economic information unless you resort to pie charts. Pity Dukes couldn't see it, but there was far more substance than style to the two-part series. And maybe viewers needed some repetitive visuals to calm their minds for a moment, because the information coming from the impressive list of contributors charting how our little island was mismanaged by our government and how close we are to economic collapse was so dismaying.

There was nothing we haven’t heard before, but put together in two programmes it was like those invaluable revision notes that students fall on at exam time. Getting the view from abroad was crucial, and top-notch contributors included the French finance minister, Christine Lagarde, the former UK chancellor Alastair Darling, the British regulator Adair Turner, Prof Joseph Stiglitz of Columbia University and Prof Robert Shiller of Yale.

All the essential information was there in its barest form, and the programme took a clear editorial line: the banking collapse had its seeds in light-touch regulation. Blame the regulator if you like, but he was ultimately just following government policy; the Government, out of ignorance, stupidity or greed, kept blowing up the property bubble. Most depressingly of all, we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in now if policy decisions had been taken sooner.

Brian Lenihan’s contributions were puzzling and unsatisfactory; eyeballing the camera, he recounted the chronology of the banking collapse and the folly of an economy relying so much on the property sectors, as if he was an academic explaining to a slightly dim audience a problem that had nothing to do with him – though he did intimate that things could have been done differently by the then minister for finance, Brian Cowen.

But the man who came over as the very definition of denial was the boom’s taoiseach, Bertie Ahern. The editorialising continued, but subtly. This was a programme of talking heads; contributors said their piece with no questioning or prompts, so Ahern’s self-serving assertions and apparent complacency went unchallenged, but the camera did go to extreme close-up, something it didn’t do with other contributors. Bertie’s big pale face – where is that fat make-up budget when you need it? – filled the screen, lest anyone forget who was at the helm during the whole sorry mess.

Straight question Taking the bull by the horns

"Taoiseach, you must be aware that radio programmes and the internet are alive with the belief that you were either drunk or hungover during your interview on Morning Ireland."

It was probably the shortest TV interview of the week, all of a minute, but Ursula Halligan of TV3 got in the thick of the media scrum around Brian Cowen on Tuesday morning in the lobby of the Ardilaun Hotel, in Galway, and did that thing no one else with a microphone was brave enough to do: she asked the question that was on everybody's mind.

Though she was just doing her job, there was a real sense from the Taoiseach that she was breaking ranks. He looked astonished to be even asked such a question. He blustered and denied, still unaware at that stage that the hangover from the interview was going to be more painful and more protracted than anything a skinful of gargle could produce. It's a clip that will be dragged from the archives over and over again.