Authenticity is a highly contested term in academia: media personalities are clearly constructs, a mix of talent, producers’ visions and storylines, yet those who spot it call it ‘TV gold’. Something about Jamie Oliver transgresses the rules. This chapter explores the making of Jamie Oliver as the authentic hero of modern television, and the production process of one of the most effective narratives in television at a time when we urgently need to change the story of how we eat.
In 2013, I had my first interview with Zoe Collins, Creative Director of the Jamie Oliver Media Group, who oversees all of Fresh One’s food output. We would meet several more times over the course of writing this book, through the sugar tax and the dramatic failure of his restaurant business. She and Jamie Oliver had first met when she was a young production assistant at BBC Radio 1 in charge of the guests on the Breakfast Show with Zoe Ball. They got on well, and he asked her to join him when he left Pat Llewellyn’s Optomen Productions to set up his own company, Fresh One Productions, in 2001. The story is told more comprehensively in my 2008 book about Jamie Oliver, but as Collins and I talked through his move from BBC Two to Channel 4, we reminisced about how the narratives had changed. From The Naked Chef of the Llewellyn era (1999– 2001), Channel 4’s handcuff deal demanded access to his ‘real’ life and introduced jeopardy to underscore new cliffhanger storylines.
When we first met, Britain was just emerging from the fallout of the 2008 global crash. Austerity was still foregrounding most people’s daily choices, and the debate around climate change had moved beyond all reasonable doubt to become a major factor in influencing how we should buy our food. The cost of sustainable food was a very real tension between the slow and organic food movements and supermarkets like Tesco, which insisted on putting customer choice before the needs of the planet. Since 2005’s Jamie’s School Dinners, Fresh One produced Jamie at Home, also for Channel, 4 in 2007, which focussed on growing and cooking Oliver’s own produce in his new family home in the Essex countryside. It fed into the allotment movement and was a gentle, instructional reminder of how simple life can be. But, in his walled medieval kitchen garden just outside London’s commuter belt, it hardly spoke to the Tesco BOGOF (buy one get one free) customer. Jamie’s Ministry of Food (Channel 4, 2008), Jamie’s Food Revolution (ABC, 2010– 11; titled Jamie’s American Food Revolution on Channel 4) and Jamie’s Dream School (Channel 4, 2011), which would bring together some of Britain’s most inspiring artists, entrepreneurs, politicians and community leaders to persuade 20 young people to give education a second chance, would once again pitch Oliver in a new role as social guardian.
I asked Collins in 2013, how the socio- economics of the country affected new ideas for Jamie Oliver shows at Fresh One. ‘One of the things that I think has changed over the years are our sympathies towards the audience’, she said. ‘Especially at the moment, when all of us are feeling the pinch. None of us are as flush as we used to be.’ The blame for the crash had been placed at the door of the City, at the ‘wanker- bankers’, as Pat Llewellyn had called them in an earlier interview in 2013. Collins explained how it went to the heart of their creative planning: ‘I think we have slightly less tolerance for people who we perceive to be not putting back into society and just sort of helping themselves. Our tolerance of that is low right now.’ I asked what was next in terms of Jamie programmes. ‘We don’t know where we are’, she said. ‘We’re sitting back at the moment. We don’t want to go through the pain right now. We’re looking at different subject areas.’
The pain she was referring to was the ‘failure’ of Jamie’s American Food Revolution to transform American food habits and promote a healthier school lunch programme. The production company had worked with and consulted some of the most influential people in the country, including American food legend, Alice Waters, and the show was nominated for the VH1 Do Something TV Show Award for its efforts to promote healthy eating at public schools. It even won an Emmy for Outstanding Reality Program, but it was its low ratings that made the headlines. Much was made of it being replaced by the entertaining but lightweight Dancing with the Stars, a kick in the teeth for campaigning and a reminder of what America wanted from a night in front of the telly. Oliver himself was accused of putting his foreign nose in business that wasn’t his; according to the Daily Mail, he was told by DJ Rod Willis on Rocky n’ Rod, a country station morning show, ‘We don’t want to sit around eating lettuce all day! Who made you king?’
What made Jamie Oliver king was a Homeric journey through the gods and monsters of high ideals and human failure, of institutional and cultural brick walls, and a narrative that had audiences across the world rooting for a hero in a bleak world. From Jamie’s Kitchen, the seven- part series which aired in 2002 following Oliver’s new deal with Channel 4, to Jamie’s School Dinners, the four- part series broadcast in 2005, Oliver played the vulnerable hero setting himself up against the system, including his own broadcaster, on behalf of the disposs restaurant, and the primary school children fed a diet which was more about food industry profits than nutritional balance. The first led to the opening, against all odds, of his first charity restaurant, Fifteen, and the training of 15 disadvantaged young people who would become his first brigade of chefs. The shows regularly reached audiences of five million in the UK, and the training programme ran for a further 14 years until it was transformed into the Fifteen Apprentice Programme, which aimed to have at least one chef in each of the now defunct Jamie’s Italian restaurants in the UK.
In Jamie’s Ministry of Food, the Odyssey narrative had Oliver, the warrior, arriving in Rotherham – where obesity levels are some of the highest in the UK – on a quest to teach the town to cook, and to tackle a series of personal challenges when he met eight people living on a diet of crisps and chocolate bars. As he taught them to cook simple recipes, they committed to sharing the recipes in a ‘pass it on’ campaign that would embed the learning, model the process and spread the skills. The idea was that it was not just the person who would be transformed, but the whole town – including Oliver himself, who had to confront his own expectations and sense of personal success and failure. I asked Collins in 2013 if there was a deliberate use of this narrative in the planning of the show. She told me that although Jamie would never call himself a ‘hero’, and she wouldn’t ‘have that conversation with him or talk about it in those terms’, she would use that word with her team. ‘And in the edit, we would probably think about it in that way’, she added.
The series is one upon which academics have feasted, drawing as the show does on rich themes of patriarchy, neo- liberalism and the British brand of austerity rehashed so prolifically in the post- economic crash era. ‘Our mission is to empower, educate and inspire as many people as possible to love and enjoy good food’, proclaimed Jamie’s Ministry of Food website. Borrowing from the ideology of Lord Woolton’s Second World War Ministry of Food, the series used the language of austerity, with its themes of rationing and frugality juxtaposed with invention andessed – the homeless whom he would train to become chefs in his own resourcefulness as a metaphor for the British character. British food writer William Sitwell tells the forgotten story of Woolton as the architect of the British diet, which helped the fat rich lose weight and the malnourished poor achieve their calorie needs healthily. In his book, Eggs or Anarchy (2016), Sitwell describes how strict rationing was underpinned by an ethos based on simple pleasures and economical intelligence, and he encouraged rather than penalised the ingenuity of the great British cook who could make the most of the few ingredients on offer.
This rationing period following the Second World War is still recalled as a golden era when the state and the country worked together for the common good. Food writer Bee Wilson says that the certainty of just enough good food on the table during and just after the Second World War gave Britons a sense of being looked after: ‘People still remember the blackcurrant puree they were given as children’, she said on BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week in 2016. It was also a rare acknowledgement by the British government of the role that healthy food plays in the spirit of a nation. For practical reasons, a nation must be healthy in times of hardship; the Japanese government, for example, broke a one- thousand- year taboo on eating meat by deliberately promoting a carnivorous diet in the late nineteenth century that would strengthen the nation in a period of major restoration. By the 1920s, it targeted the soldiers of the Imperial Army, urging Japanese housewives to cook recipes borrowed from China and India, such as katsu and stir fries, which were considered to be cheap and easy ways to build the health of men of fighting age. After the Second World War, in order to combat hunger in school, Japanese children were given white bread rolls flavoured with a strange curry powder mix and washed down with a glass of milk, which, Bee Wilson argues, would endow them with an eclectic palate that would give rise to a nation of adventurous food lovers, and one of the world’s healthiest and most delicious national diets.
In Jamie’s Ministry of Food, the theme of war summons that of the Great British Spirit, the make- do- and- mend principle of using what you’ve got to survive. As Oliver shows his class of eight how to cook with simple, inexpensive ingredients that could save the town from obesity, they become his foot soldiers. By learning a few recipes and taking responsibility for teaching the recipes to others, the ‘Pass It On’ campaign aimed to revive the spirit of the town, with the message being that people could save themselves. Oliver, the warrior, would then ride on to the next town to continue his quest.
In her 2011 article, ‘Foucault’s progeny: Jamie Oliver and the art of governing obesity’, Megan Warin suggests that the narrative empowers the audience to demand change from the contributors to the shows. Turning the camera on a televisual activity, she suggests, could be described as a Foucauldian contract, an agreement between a community out of control that allows itself to be filmed while it attempts transformation. Warin writes, ‘Through the lens of the camera, Oliver provides a window in which the audience observe and judge the everyday lives of the people of Rotherham. Like much documentary- based Reality TV, the Ministry of Food operates as a panopticon, a model of surveillance in which Oliver becomes an omnipresent guard, policing’ people’s everyday lifestyles. But the disciplinary forces of surveillance have stepped outside Bentham’s prison, and seep out into a social body, flowing through the networks of the socius.’ She joins Ouellette and Hay, who argue in their 2008 book, Better Living through Reality TV: Television and Post- Welfare Citizenship, that this form of documentary- based Reality TV has become a ‘new form of cultural technology in which individuals and populations learn how to take care of themselves through self- monitoring, responsibility, choice and empowerment’ in a ‘televised form of governmentality’. The Biggest Loser, You Are What You Eat, Honey, We’re Killing the Kids, Fat Camp and Britain’s Biggest Babies (and the international versions of each of these shows) are cited by Warin as prime examples of this genre. Television becomes a social arbiter, willing those who can’t cook, whose children are obese and threatening the national health of the country, to get into line. ‘Reality TV is a milieu for education and intervention rather than a source of representation, and has thus become one of the most important resources for people to manage their “out of control” lives in world of risks and insecurities’, wrote Warin in 2011.
Zoe Collins uses the same terminology to describe a TV producer’s approach to television narratives. ‘Producers don’t like “out of control narrative lines”’, she said, referring to journeys into the unknown and campaigns with uncertain outcomes, despite the fact that two of Fresh One’s most successful series were School Dinners and Jamie’s Kitchen which were narratives predicated on uncertainty. But television is a useful tool: from a production perspective, the surveillance narrative encourages a response, an expectation of something about to happen. Casting is essential, as Amanda Murphy explained in relation to the transformational quality of Jamie: ‘You can do this combined casting of this super character who can transform whatever you want to transform or affect people’s lives enormously, and you cross- cast them with people who are needy or people with a passion for something that they need or want in life.’ In their 2008 article, Ouellette and Hay could have been addressing Murphy: ‘Everyday life has become a staple for reality TV, in which “needy” individuals and populations are targeted, and transformed into functioning citizens.’
Megan Warin argued in 2011 that Jamie’s Ministry of Food broke new ground in that it spotted an opportunity for television to create a technological self- help community, with Oliver holding the puppet strings and audience expectation driving the need for narrative. She describes Oliver as ‘Foucault’s progeny’: ‘What distinguishes [Jamie’s] Ministry of Food from other weight- loss reality shows, is the targeting of individuals and the whole community (and by implication, a whole region and nation of England). Rather than focussing on individual players in a competitive role play, the community approach presents a new form of reality TV that seemingly fits with social models of “new” public health.’ This constitutes a new role for TV audiences, she argues, and demonstrates a ‘new and intimate relationship between reality TV, health promotion and governmentality’. In 2008, Ouellette and Hay were on the same page as Warin: ‘Reality TV is this rationalisation and comes to the fore as an “object of regulation” [and policy] designed to nurture citizenship and civil society, and an instrument for educating, improving, and shaping subjects.’
Jamie’s Ministry of Food was not just about overcoming food demons: with the cameras in her home, Julie Critchlow, who led the ‘Burger Wars’ in response to Oliver’s ban on fast food in Jamie’s School Dinners, made her peace with her media- constructed enemy in the first of Oliver’s Ministry of Food quests. In the opening episode, Critchlow and her mother meet Oliver for the first time after battling via the newspapers, and, after apologies on both sides, she agrees to sign up to be part of Oliver’s ‘Pass It On’ campaign, in which eight food ambassadors learn to cook simple recipes and pass them on to two people who then do the same. In 15 steps, the whole of the town will be cooking and, by implication, will be made of better people. The message is clear: feuds can be laid to rest through the civilising effect of good food. I watched the episode with media academics, Professors Anita Biressi and Heather Nunn, who noticed that Oliver used the same device as he did in Dream School: ‘He parachutes in and uses his experience to educate ambassadors that then go out and the message spreads’, said Heather Nunn in 2017. This is the mushrooming that Murphy described to me in [YEAR]. Nunn also suggested that a criticism of the show might be the absence of a broader context: ‘It’s a highly individualized approach to improving education about food, accessibility to food, stuff about the economics of food supplies. On the other hand, it’s appealing and you can see how he’s trying to address a certain level of ignorance. There’s a very basic set of skills that people don’t have now.’
Sally Munt, in her 2000 book Cultural Studies and the Working Class, writes that class is always constructed in ways that serve those in power: ‘The primary interest has been in finding audiences who read against the grain. The approach has been to place the locus of responsibility onto readers, rather than producers. Isn’t there a kind of shame existing here? Aspiration, in class terms, is largely concerned with escape, rather than the reconstruction of available icons.’
Jamie Oliver’s willingness to ‘cut through the crap’ and ‘get things done’ resonated with the notion that Britain was a society in need of healing, and that local and national government were incapable of remedying the situation. But, in her 2012 book Food Media, Signe Rousseau argues that Oliver is practising what she terms ‘everyday interference’, and she questions why he should take on the task in place of an appointed advocate. She admits that the answer is complex, but suggests that Jamie Oliver has employed the special cachet of the TV chef, who is there to soothe the national brow with a clear authority at a time of food scares and diet- related health crises, all while waving the magic wand of celebrity. Rousseau goes on to say that the media has become a more democratic platform for social reform at a time when people have become more political but have also lost faith in politicians. It was an empowering moment for audiences who invested their belief in a man of the people who might change the world.
As the series rolled out across the UK and other territories, the campaign achieved some success. A study commissioned by the Food Foundation and led by the Department of Population Nutrition and Global Health at the University of Auckland, and the World Health Organisation Collaborating Centre for Obesity Prevention at Deakin University in Melbourne concluded that the campaign increased confidence in key skills areas including daily food preparation. Six months after the programme was completed, participants’ daily vegetable consumption reportedly increased by more than one half serve. The series also evidenced an increase in the frequency of families eating together, as well as a reduction in the consumption of takeaway meals.
But the question remains: does it really work? If Jamie Oliver Television is, as Megan Warin suggests in her 2011 article, like a panopticon in which participants are surveyed 24/ 7, does it matter as long as they signed the consent form and the results are positive? If the criticism is of shaming the poor into eating more healthily, who is being more condescending: the TV producers who cast the participants, or those who presume (often without having watched the shows) that the participants’ consent was not appropriately informed? In 2017, Nunn told me that to me how ultimately it is the audience ratings that determine a show’s success, though academics may ‘sneer’ at what a good night in front of the telly is often all about: ‘We (with Anita Biressi) wrote an article on sentimentality and Secret Millionaire and one of the things that we tried to grasp is that while there are so many things that we found troubling about Secret Millionaire. We sat there watching more and more, there were times when I thought the humanity of the shows – we’d be quite gripped. Sometimes I’d sit there and I’d feel like crying and I think it’s because it’s constructed but they are still people, just like us and you can feel an emotional connection even if they are produced for TV. One of the things that we said is that sentimentality is sneered at. It’s seen as the lowest form of emotion.’
From Taste and the TV Chef, Gilly Smith, 2020. Reproduced with permission from Intellect Books. You can buy the book here.
This is such an interesting piece – and shocking: there was a time when politicians were really on the ball about the nation's food. Now they neither care whether the population eats or what it eats when it does.