When Jamie Oliver tried on a different archetype, this time as ‘expert’ in education, the daggers were out.
Jamie’s Dream School (Channel 4, 2011) was a response to Oliver’s personal experience with young people and the education system following Channel 4’s Jamie’s School Dinners (2005) and Jamie’s Kitchen (2002). Oliver is one of Britain’s great meritocrats: he left school with two GCSEs yet is one of the richest men in Britain and an internationally famous celebrity. It is his passion that drives him to choose the subjects of his programmes and leads him to explore the sociological and often psychological roots of the issues that he addresses.
Despite his dyslexia (he read his first book, The Hunger Games, after watching his children enjoy the trilogy), he studied Food Nutrition through St Mary’s University in Twickenham, Greater London in 2014, and in 2016 he started a Masters in the subject. He told The Times newspaper: ‘It might take two or three years but I’m going to give it a good go. It’s completely changed my life. It’s proper geeky, I could go off on one.’
Zoe Collins explained how the idea developed, telling me that he wanted to use the experience of ‘having worked at Fifteen with all these young teenagers and seen how real practical skills can empower them and give them a sense of self- worth and self- respect and really propel them onwards’. He wanted to see if there was another way for education to be, she told me, that if what he had done for food with Fifteen could happen again: ‘If we brought inspirational characters into the mix, can we together, each of us, do – and prove – something interesting?’
But as the series of seven episodes followed the experience of 20 young people who had ‘failed’ at school, Oliver’s role of moral entrepreneur was given short shrift by the nation’s teachers. ‘Six Weeks summer holiday almost makes up for having the likes of #Jamieoliver make a mockery of your profession #jamiesdreamschool’, tweeted one teacher. ‘Completely irrelevant – teaching skills come 1st then excellent subject knowledge – didn’t we see that proved by #jamiesdreamschool’, wrote another. ‘Why are #jamiesdreamschool students & staff giving evidence to the Ed Com in House of Commons! It’s a TV show, a manufactured moment in time’, tweeted another viewer. But ‘I can’t believe I am watching BBC’s Parliament channel at 7– 30 am during the holidays but it’s the committee on #jamiesdreamschool’, said a fan for whom the initiative hadn’t worked.
‘I am a huge fan of Jamie Oliver’, wrote The Telegraph’s TV critic, Allison Pearson in 2011. ‘The young chef has a better gut instinct for what ails this country than any politician. Jamie knows that something is badly amiss when disruption is as endemic in our classrooms as kebabs are in our diet. When it comes to nourishing proudly ignorant young minds, however, the poor guy has bitten off more than he can chew.’ Yet, with its narrative driven by the jeopardy of whether or not Britain’s greatest actors, musicians, artists and business people could engage a class of truants and academic failures, Dream School did win.
Rather than pitching the students against each other as in The Apprentice genre of reality competition TV, the Jamie Oliver narrative is about beating public expectation. As with his Ministry of Food (Channel 4, 2008), Dream School was about confounding the judgement of an unseen audience, both for the students who had been excluded from school (read: society) and the ‘teachers’ who used their own entrepreneurial enthusiasm, authenticity and love for their subject to break through the barriers around learning and make dreams come true.
Biressi and Nunn write in their 2013 book, Class and Contemporary British Culture, that Oliver ‘legitimated an already developing public discourse that entrepreneurialism was a better solution to social problems than state intervention’. It seemed that under this narrative, The People really could take on the government. ‘As the classmates headed to Downing Street for a meeting with then Prime Minister, David Cameron’, write Biressi and Nunn, ‘the ‘arc of the series […] travelled from individual struggles via a transformation narrative towards public engagement around social issues by non- state actors.’
Biressi and Nunn devote a whole chapter to critiquing Jamie’s Dream School as an opportunity to explore the relationship between education and social mobility, and responsible citizenship. They focus on meritocracy and personal responsibility, considering ‘ways in which educational choice is presented, taken up or passed by’. Their argument is set within the discourse of neo- liberalism which others have already explored (they note Becker’s 2006; McCarthy’s 2007; McMurria 2008; and Ouellette and Hay’s 2008 Better Living through Reality). This neo- liberal framework is about ‘choice, entrepreneurialism and self- reliance’, and suggests that democracy is enabled by aspiration and choice. Effective citizens in the narratives of Reality and Lifestyle TV are those who can drive through social, educational and class barriers to where they need to be in order to climb the ladder and take their place in the world.
Making the most of the wide range of economic and social determinants on offer, as Bourdieu points out in his 1984 book, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, citizens draw on their networks and milk their worlds for opportunities to gather cultural and social capital. Valerie Walkerdine adds, in her 2003 article ‘Femininities: Reclassifying upward mobility and the neo- liberal subject’: ‘Within advanced neoliberalism the social state gives way to the enabling state, and is no longer responsible for providing all of society’s needs for security, health, education and so on. Individuals, firms, organisations, schools, hospitals, parents and so on, must each and all take on a portion of the responsibility for their own well- being. The social and the economic are seen as antagonistic. Economic government is de- socialised in order to maximise the entrepreneurial conduct of the individual: politics must actively intervene in order to create the organisational and subjective conditions for entrepreneurship.’
Jamie’s Dream School and Jamie’s Ministry of Food were a fast- track way of introducing the underprivileged to the world of cultural capital through education and food, which would open the door to good health and better opportunities. Climbing the ladder in front of a judgemental audience was part of the deal. Academic, Signe Rousseau told me in 2016 that the concept of surveillance extends to Jamie Oliver himself: ‘We’re all watching the guy grow up, and that makes him vulnerable too. Obviously, there are bits of the narrative of Jamie’s life that are constructed and we don’t have access to everything, but I do get the sense that we have access to quite a lot.’ She mentioned the scene in School Dinners when Jamie read his wife a newspaper headline claiming that he had had an affair: ‘they were having a bit of a thing on the street and he was in tears and she was in tears and it was great television’, remembered Rousseau. ‘It looked convincing enough to suggest that it wasn’t scripted.’
Robert Thirkell was the series editor of Jamie’s School Dinners, and in his 2010 book CONFLICT: An Insider’s Guide to Storytelling in Factual/ Reality TV and Film, he explains how he used the ‘quest narrative’ with such success: ‘Narrative drive, the arc of the film’, he writes, ‘is small questions and small answers which all contribute to the big question and big answer. We have to embark on a scene with the expectation that it will take us somewhere different at the end than where it began.’ He articulated the big question for School Dinners in ‘fairy- tale terms: “an evil giant – big bad food – was rampaging round the land, leading to illness in children and even eventually to their early death. The government didn’t seem to know what to do about it.” As the audience boo and hiss, enter Jamie Oliver, stage left: “could plucky Jamie slay the monster of big bad food and show the wicked king – i.e. the government – that it could be done better?” ’
But the fairy tale didn’t work with the big guys. Jamie’s American Food Revolution in 2010/2011 was the moment when Lifestyle TV came face to face with the realities of life’s stories: after his initial success in the US as the archetypal British cheeky chappie in The Naked Chef, the failure of Jamie Oliver to change the American diet was about the inability of Entertainment TV to tackle the systemic issues underscoring the big questions, which Thirkell refers to in his book. In this case, the big question was obesity, not just in America but across the western world. Arun Gupta’s 2010 article, ‘How TV superchef Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution flunked out’, lists the systemic issues as follows: ‘widespread poverty, sedentary lifestyles, junk- food advertising, a lack of health care, corporate control of the food system, the prevalence of cheap fast food, food designed to be addictive, and subsidies and policies that make meats and sugars cheaper than whole fruits and vegetables’. It left nutritionists frustrated and Oliver in tears.
Heather Nunn is among the many academics who accuse him of having ‘shamed the poor white trash culture of food’ in Jamie’s American Food Revolution: ‘He was coming out as a missionary’, she told me in 2017. ‘It’s one of the areas that people were very pleased to see him not succeed. Even though Jamie has a huge warmth and I always want him to win, at the same time, he’s staking a claim in a political setting. You look at Dream School, which I wanted to like but I couldn’t get over the obstacle of him fixing a few people in that setting, in the context of our educational landscape. If he’s going to hit big, people are going to judge him as the context. They’re probably not interested in whether he cares about the people in the programme. They’re interested in the bigger claims he’s making politically.’
Nick Piper’s 2015 article, ‘Jamie Oliver and cultural intermediation’ makes a similar point: ‘So- called “ordinary experts” such as Jamie Oliver need to be understood in the context of their varied social reception in order to assess whether people really do accept their authority as taste makers and domestic pedagogues. For one thing, this might cause academics to reconsider the extent to which a socially differentiated audience regards their particular version of ordinariness or expertise as valuable. There’s a real underlying concern in the academic debate about the extent to which celebrity chefs and food media carry the ability to democratise taste. This underlines a key point in the debate about the value of celebrity chefs as cultural intermediaries.’
In her 2012 book, Food Media: Celebrity Chefs and the Politics of Everyday Interference, Signe Rousseau is clear that, for her, Jamie Oliver is categorically not in a position of authority or expertise. The issue is about getting the facts right and acknowledging the enormity of the issue. She criticises Jamie Oliver’s mission to ‘plant the seeds of change in America in terms of helping a community to cook better, feed their kids better and save money’. She uses de Certeau’s 1984 article on ‘The Expert’ (another archetype) to study his performance at Long Beach, California, where he accepted a TED prize. He told the audience, ‘Sadly, in the next 18 minutes when I do our chat, four Americans will be dead from the food they eat.’ The figures were wrong, although the message of his address was not.
Rousseau reports accusations of a ‘junk science peddled by St Jamie’, conflating various statistics from a number of sources and, instead of exaggerating the figures, inadvertently underrepresenting the threat of obesity. ‘One of the most memorable scenes at the end of Food Revolution’, Rousseau told me in 2016, ‘is when he’s addressing this conference of nutritionists and dieticians and people who work in schools, and lots of them for many years have been trying to do something to improve the school meals situation and of course it’s not just that the people in the canteens don’t care, it’s that there’s all sorts of red tape and funding and all of that business. There was a question from someone at the end and he said ‘what makes you so special? You’re standing there talking to a group of scientists and people who know about nutrition. What makes you uniquely qualified to tackle the situation?’ We didn’t hear how he answered the question but in the next shot he’s standing outside and he’s gutted. He couldn’t believe that they weren’t more receptive to his ideas. It crystallised something for me in terms of what I was trying to argue, and to ask. I really would have liked to have heard what he answered.’
I told Rousseau how John Ingram, Food Systems Programme Leader at the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford University, had asked me to take a message to Jamie Oliver via Zoe Collins. Ingram had delivered a lecture in 2013 on food security and its impact on the environment, and had urged the need for the consumer to play a more important role in changing attitudes towards waste. ‘The power vested in the food industry has changed from the grower dictating what we eat to the consumer at the cash till’, he said. ‘We need to talk about the cultural function of food and ask what its meta- role is. We need to appreciate the motives of why people do what they do and use regulation, coercion, education and personal action to change habits.’ He told me that the most important way to bring about this change was to talk to Jamie Oliver.
Rousseau listened as I told her what happened when I took the message to Zoe Collins a week later. She told me how they had tried – and failed – to deal with waste. ‘We had an item on Food Fight Club [Channel 4, 2012] called Rude Veg’, Collins told me, ‘and it was exactly that. It was a knobbly veg campaign. We ran it on Instagram for a while with the hashtag #rudeveg and you’ll see lots of hilarious knobbly penises and things. It didn’t make the show because it was too puerile but it made us laugh a lot because we are all really puerile. We needed to move the narrative on and we just didn’t have enough time to produce it very well so it didn’t work.’
She, like many other producers I talked to, explained how difficult austerity narratives are, and how hard it is to produce a factual entertainment programme about bad news. ‘If you had a show about waste, I could easily see an item on Food Tube about the ugliest thing you’ve ever seen in your life. It could be really funny getting Aaron Craze to cook the ugliest things that he can find and that’s entertaining and informative, but presented by your academic who wants to do it for long- term benefits doesn’t work’, she said in 2016.
Since this conversation, Blue Planet has brought the waste narrative to life by highlighting the devastating impact of plastics on our oceans, and Hugh Fearnley- Whittingstall followed- up with his War on Waste series on the BBC in 2015. These are both great examples of how to bring difficult topics to life through emotional and dramatic storytelling.
But seven months after my chat with Collins in 2013, Jamie’s Money Saving Meals was on Channel 4, with the accompanying Penguin book, Save with Jamie, the Christmas Number 1 bestseller that year. Niki Page, then of Freemantle Distribution, told me how it was sold to her: ‘It’s about thrift. The idea is if restaurants ran their business like we run our homes, they’d go bust. It’s not about cheap food, but about key ingredients.’ Rousseau remembered the book. ‘I thought that the Save with Jamie book was great’, she told me in 2016. ‘You take a recipe and then there are five other things to do with the leftovers.’ If Oliver can give an audience tools to buy more carefully, I suggested to her, isn’t this the meta- role of food that Ingram wanted to be communicated to the consumer through Factual Entertainment TV? What Jamie Oliver is uniquely able to do, I continued, is to take the message to the masses, to talk to nutritionists and come back with information and put it on television in a way that people will hear and respond. ‘I think that’s a compelling answer to that question’, conceded Rousseau. ‘I would say that you’re right.’ But she pointed out that it was the narrative of the ‘crusading lone chef going out and brazenly claiming to be an expert on childhood nutrition’ that was the problem in Jamie’s American Food Revolution. ‘Just because you’re a chef doesn’t make you an expert on childhood nutrition. Now he’s got a whole team of nutrition experts on his website who can answer questions about how to manage diabetes and things like that. It’s a fairly “dodgy” thing – something that could backfire.’
Zoe Collins told me what she thought hadn’t gone so well in America, and like Thirkell, she referred to the fairy- tale narrative: ‘When we make those documentary series, we like to see our heroes suffer, to see them fight a losable fight’, she told me. ‘That’s when we care about them. We want to see them up against it and then finally we can step down and love them, and then our hero will eventually win.’ But she realised that in America, that doesn’t work: ‘It’s success that they sympathise with’, she said.
The postman can be the president, as Amanda Murphy, who had to reframe Channel 4’s Supernanny (2004– 08), reminded us in a previous chapter. ‘So what worked in the UK, in the US impacted in a much more negative way’, Collins explained. ‘We used the same arguments that Jamie had with Nora (the school cook in Jamie’s School Dinners) in the UK, but in West Virginia it was a much bigger deal and often equated to fat shaming, a topic which at that time had yet to find its voice in the UK. She said the series producer in America was under a lot of pressure: ‘People were saying to him, “campaign, campaign, campaign. We’ve got to do this; we’ve got to do that.” I said to him, all you need to do is make a really good TV show. Because that’s your job. The campaign will work if the TV show works. So I’m really clear about what my job is. My job is to make the strongest piece of narrative TV as I possibly can.’
The narrative extended off- screen as British audiences read in the media that Jamie was failing in America. Collins noticed how it strengthened his following in the UK. ‘It was, “oh my god, look at all those people saying Jamie’s wrong. We must back Jamie.” ’ Like the bruising of all heroes, the only people who care are their own. ‘Jamie wasn’t in the club. He had to fight his way in’, said Collins. She wondered if America is ‘more about your civil rights and freedom. They defend the right to do what you want to do. We’re much more into being told what to do. I think he fell foul of that.’
Television plays an interesting role in conferring expert status on Oliver in a postmodern televisual environment, where we can check figures on a phone while we suspend our disbelief and watch a chef try to change the world. The performance of being Jamie Oliver is central to the power of his message. Oliver is open about his severe dyslexia and relies on a team to represent his ideas in his texts, including scripts.
Yet we want to believe in the Odyssey narrative, enjoying the audacity of hope which, for many people, underpinned the Obama presidency. Rousseau is concerned that it is too superficial to work: in her 2012 book, she wrote, ‘Oliver is proof that celebrity chefs can be both empowering and inspiring in various ways. But the risk that accompanies their victories is that it becomes all too easy to rely on someone else to tell us how to live.’
But perhaps this example best illustrates how production companies, presenters and their audiences are equally entranced by Baudrillard’s simulacrum of television, the slipping between reality and its representation on- screen. It is the symbiotic relationship between production (and I include the presenter’s performance in this) and audience that creates the image, the investment both ways that suspends the disbelief. When that is successfully produced, with a match between instinct and intelligent research, it works. Jamie’s American Food Revolution was an example of what happens when belief is ruptured by the production team getting it wrong.
Understanding the mindset of an audience is complex, yet Entertainment TV can cross cultures and speak to a wide variety of audiences with enormous effect. Stanford University’s Priya Fielding- Singh has researched attitudes towards healthy eating among high and low socio- economic status (SES) groups in America, but her research may chime with researchers in other territories. She suggests that framing theory, which provides a lens through which experience shapes choices, can explain why so many families which value their children’s health and understand how to make healthy choices, feel unable to do so. Her interviews with 68 American families in the summer of 2016 revealed how poverty shifts priorities.
She found that low SES families operate through a poverty frame which makes them focus more on the present. High SES families function through an abundance frame and are therefore able to plan more efficiently to meet their goals of feeding their children healthy food. Ninety- five per cent of her high SES research group said that they refuse to give in to their children’s requests for unhealthy food choices compared with 10% of low SES respondents, despite both groups sharing long- term goals for their children’s health. Most revealingly, the low SES group felt that giving their children what they asked for meant saying ‘one less no’ in the day: being unable to give them the field trips, vacations and treats, which were affordable to the high SES group, meant saying yes to easier demands such as a takeaway burger.
The screen offers viewers a way of changing the story, but can it change the frame? I asked Rousseau if she thought that Jamie Oliver had gathered enough skills now through his Odyssey to make meaningful change. ‘Well, I would say he already has done something meaningful’, she told me. ‘I think there are limits to what he can do, and I don’t say that cynically. I think it would be a mistake to think that it’s Jamie Oliver who’s going to save the obesity problem. It’s going to be Jamie Oliver and everyone else who’s also working hard on different platforms and everyone has their own reach. He certainly has the opportunity to be a major force in something if there is going to be a revolution in terms of things turning around. You can give people all the tools they want, but if they want to eat shit food, they’re going to be able to do that.’
Collins is realistic: ‘The audience is always changing’, she told me in 2013. ‘They don’t come to watch him do “good”. They come to watch him fail. Only when he had slayed the dragon did we allow ourselves to celebrate his success. He was really miserable in Food Revolution. We were shoving the camera in his face.’
Yet only two years later, in an interview with the Radio Times about his off- screen school dinners campaign, Oliver was clear that he had learned from the past and seemed to have a renewed energy; he admitted in The Telegraph in 2015: ‘I haven’t succeeded, mainly because I haven’t single- mindedly gone for it. In Britain, eating well and feeding your kid right and being aware about food is all considered very posh and middle class, but the reality is that in most of Europe some of the best food comes from the poorest communities.’ He was about to take on his biggest challenge yet.
From Taste and the TV Chef, Gilly Smith, 2020. Reproduced with permission from Intellect Books. You can buy the book here.