Old published stuff

Originally posted on Orange.co.uk Posted by Stewart Turner Who’s that sneaking down to the kitchen in a silk gown to satisfy her midnight cheesecake urges? Why, it’s Nigella of course, back for a 13-episode tutorial in the fine art of alliteration, with a little bit of cooking thrown in for good measure. “Gorgeous golden gleaming gloop” was last night’s winner, weighing in at a respectable four words. A peanut butter cheesecake, in case you were wondering. Kicking off the show with an evocative snapshot of David Cameron’s Britain, we joined Nigella as she slinked out of Sloane Square station before heading home to show us her sizeable pantry. Home to an enviable collection of different-shaped pastas, popcorn buckets and pepper-shaped fairy lights, it’s big enough to house a family of four in some of the poorer parts of the capital. When she wasn’t cooking cakes to the point where they “had a hint of inner-thigh wibble”, Nigella rustled up some delicious-looking roast se...

Originally posted on IsleOne Thursday, September 16th, 2010 See all stewart turner's posts on IsleOne stewart turner on his blog Serving up 48oz steaks probably isn’t the brightest business model for a restaurant, even if you utilize one of Thanet’s less salubrious butchers shops; but whether the collapse of Fatty Towers was down to spiralling catering costs or an overestimation of the nation’s love of lard remains something of a mystery. Swinging open its doors for a couple of years in the mid-90s, this was the bouncing brainchild of larger than life Bad Manners frontman Buster Bloodvessel. Taking heart from the success of his Club 18 – 30 Stone dining venture along the coast in Ramsgate, Buster set to work on a seaside complex d...

Originally published on Orange.co.uk Posted by Stewart Turner Ever wished you could have a quiet word with Carla off Coronation Street in a bid to curb her whisky-guzzling? Or tell Stacey Slater that scrapping in Albert Square is really rather unladylike? This could be the show for you. New Channel 4 "docusoap" (just don't call it reality TV, OK? ) Seven Days gives us the chance to interact with up to 18 inhabitants of Notting Hill, making suggestions and giving advice via a 'ChatNav' on the show's website. Much like the eponymous movie version of Notting Hill, Seven Days features more than its fair share of annoying poshos, and if the makers of the show were counting on making a good first impression and gripping the viewer from the outset, they certainly could've chosen a better pair to introduce us to than interior designer Hannah and her "mummy". Within about 30 seconds of watching them rah-rah-rahing over glasses of champag...

Posted by Stewart Turner These days we'll only consume tomatoes if they look like freshly polished snooker balls. Knobbly carrots are sent straight off to the pig farm without so much as a five-minute swansong on That's Life . But change is in the air, inspiring the BBC to send a collection of celebrity chefs off to pull horrified faces in Lincolnshire lettuce fields. Their task? To prepare a banquet for 60 VIPS (including Bill Oddie and Lembit Opik) from food which was on the brink of being thrown away. Now here's a poser for you: What's worse than useless unless it's between 17 - 21cm long? A courgette, apparently. Thousands of them are thrown away every single day for failing to live up to our demanding expectations. Most depressing of all was a Kentish fisherman's haul of 200 delicious slip soles destined to be chucked because they're deemed too tiny for our dinner tables. I was particularly annoyed: it's barely a couple of weeks s...

Originally posted on Isle One Legend has it your average Guardian reader can slash a couple of decades off his life just by taking a wrong turning onto the mean streets of Cliftonville en route to Broadstairs. But it wasn’t always like this: up until a few decades ago this murky pocket of seaside deprivation was a highly desirable place to live – something that’s heartbreakingly evident on those rare days when the sun streams down through the huge sky, putting a sheen on some of the most beautiful Georgian and Victorian architecture you could ever hope to clap eyes on. Despite its obvious edginess and genuinely shocking levels of poverty, Cliftonville is one of the most enchanting places in the country, with a rich history and an architectural curiosity around every corner. If this place can’t turn itself around and become a brilliant place to live once again, surely nowhere can. The fact t...

Posted by Stewart Turner “I was morbid as a child,” admitted 19-year-old undertaker Paul Gillett at the start of last night’s Cutting Edge documentary. “If I saw a dead bird in the street, I wouldn’t play with it, but I’d go and have a look.” You can’t say the signs weren’t there early on, and sure enough, these days Paul makes his cash by shaving the faces and brushing the hair of dead bodies down at the local undertakers. It’s a creepy job, but someone’s got to do it, and luckily Paul loves it – so much so that he’s just started dating a fellow teen undertaker. During arm-in-arm strolls in the park the pair of them discuss messy sessions with the coroners and the best way to keep corpses’ eyelids open. What could be more romantic? Norwich 18-year-old Laura is an even more unlikely undertaker. She was bitten by the funeral bug after doing a week’s work experience when she was just 14, and has been enthusiastically marketing death ever since. Her employers have e...

posted by Stewart Turner Ever thought those utterly mundane events that clutter up our day-to-day existence would make compelling subjects for a hilarious new sitcom? Do you find yourself bent double with laughter when you spend 10 minutes looking for your car keys only to discover they were in your pocket all along? Do you split your sides every time you forget to tell the milkman you’re going on holiday for a fortnight? Clearly quite a few people at the BBC do. As you may have gleaned from the title, the action in this new sitcom centres round the thrilling half-hour when Roger (Alfred Molina) and Val (Dawn French) return home from work. The central plot of last night’s opener was a broken vacuum cleaner and a missing receipt, all of which led to a tiresome 10 minutes of the couple rifling through the contents of their “big drawer” and musing about all manner of subjects like death, door knockers and two-for-one Specsavers vouchers. Roger and Val are the only cast me...

posted by Stewart Turner Over a grimly familiar montage of short-skirted teenage girls staggering around vomit-splattered streets and being wheeled around the nation’s overworked A&E departments, one expert summed it all up in shocking terms: "This is the first generation that’re going to die younger than their parents." And if the cerebrally challenged kids shown in last night's opening episode of The Hospital are typical, it’s not too hard to see why. Despite the last Government pumping millions into awareness campaigns, 25-year-old Michael reckons that chlamydia is “a rite of passage”, something to mark your transition from boy to man not unlike your first pint of beer in a pub. Michael “can’t remember” whether he’s had three or four partners in the last month. After his appearance last night, it’s unlikely he’ll be getting too many offers in August. Then there was Stacey, a swaggering youth who demanded to see a female doctor because the male do...

Posted by Stewart Turner My New TV Career would perhaps have been a more appropriate title for lingerie model Danielle Lineker’s look at the heartbreaking world of family break-ups. Certainly there was little in the way of insight in this hour long piece of fluff. Instead the whole thing played like a moving Hello! magazine centrespread – all long, lingering shots over wedding photos on the mantelpiece and clips of the Linekers putting out mince pies for Santa at Christmas. So what did we learn? Well, the Match of the Day man’s not too clever with a barbecue for one, and I doubt whether his undercooked chicken breasts and sorry-looking sausages did much to foster family harmony in the newly-extended Lineker household. Oh, and we also learned that the hassles of press attention mean Danielle, Gary and the kids have it even trickier than most new families. “Nothing’s ever that private,” Danielle explained to the TV documentary maker mournfully. The film mainly centred...

Posted by Stewart Turner Are cows really “one of the most successful species on the planet”? If you define success in terms of being escorted down to the abattoir at the age of six months or having your teats squeezed dry to make our Coco Pops more palatable, presenter Jimmy Doherty probably had a point. But Jimmy didn’t stop there, even claiming we have a “special relationship” with our bovine friends. I’m not convinced: We give them a decrepit old shed, an occasional change of hay and an electric fence; they give us a few gallons of milk and a couple of kilos of sirloin in return. It all seems slightly one-sided. Perhaps not for much longer. The Private Life of Cows revealed a hitherto unknown intelligence that suggested the bovine population might only be a few decades away from escaping their chains and mounting an uprising. To prove this, affable Jimmy ran through a series of experiments to reveal just how clever cows really are. First he taught them to ring a bell to ask for food...

Posted by Stewart Turner Oil Disaster: The Rig That Blew Up was never going to win any awards for its less-than-imaginative title, and true to Five’s form, this hastily cobbled together documentary about one of the planet’s worst ever ecological disasters was less than brilliant. If you tuned in expecting an in-depth assessment of the ecological impact of the explosion of Deepwater Horizon, or a look at the subsequent political fallout and President Obama’s Brit-bashing in the weeks following, you’d have been seriously disappointed. For this is Five, a channel which sticks Ice Road Truckers on at primetime and seems to be courting a target audience of blokes who get their kicks watching massive bits of machinery been driven around by Americans with handlebar moustaches. It takes all sorts. Oil Disaster focussed primarily on those first few nights after the BP-owned rig suffered a massive blowout with 126 people on board, and the efforts of the emergency services and specialists who ...

Spring has arrived and the coast is calling. With a new Turner gallery in the pipeline and a clutch of chic B&Bs and restaurants Margate is shrugging off years of decline and staging a comeback No pebbles here ... Margate sands. Photograph: Alamy The once-glorious seaside resort may have fallen on hard times, but after years of neglect a new £17.4-million art gallery is at the forefront of a bid to restore "Merry Margate's" fortunes. And, having missed out on the gentrification that transformed many of Britain's coastal resorts, Margate is now beginning to capitalise on its nostalgic, retro appeal. Opening in the spring of 2011, the Turner Contemporary will aim to entice the arty crowd away from the chichi streets of Whitstable and Broadstairs down the coast, and celebrate the resort's proud association with the arts – from JMW Turner to Tracey Emin – in the process. But there's no need wait until it open...

Posted by Stewart Turner There’s really nothing worse than a relentlessly cocky posh kid, is there? And with this in mind, this latest slice of poverty TV kicked off with footage of 13-year-old George Abingdon showing us “daddy’s best car”, taking time out in the billiards room, and reeling off a list of his famous Gloucestershire neighbours. “If you’re born poor, you can easily change it,” he boomed, with one eye on a safe Tory seat. The format of How the Other Half Lives is a little like that of The Secret Millionaire , but instead of charities, here the cigar-chomping businessmen help out needy individuals. In the rich corner this week was David, a marketing guru who got on his bike and worked himself up from nothing “because he didn’t want to be broke”. In the poor corner was Cal, an ex-crusty who lived in a horse box for 18 years before making the life-changing decision to turn her back on The Levellers and become a barrister. While it was all refreshingly celebrity-free, and ...

Posted by Stewart Turner A couple of decades ago, TV royalty used to be rewarded for long service with a good-natured love-in on This Is Your Life – or if they were really lucky, an hour-long An Audience With… ego rub. Not any more. This being the 21st century, the celebration has to be tempered with a smattering of sneering sarcasm and Jimmy Carr one-liners. If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of “roasting”, you’ll be surprised to hear it doesn’t consist of rubbing a national treasure in goose fat and sticking him in the oven with a couple of Premier League footballers. It’s actually an American term for a bout of friendly mickey-taking. Other stars in line for the honour courtesy of Channel 4 this week include, er, Sharon Osborne and Chris Tarrant. But first up was doddering game show legend Brucie. Unsurprisingly, most of the jokes centred on either Brucie’s formidable chin or the mere fact that he hasn’t popped his clogs yet. Some were pretty good, such as the odd one-li...

Posted by Stewart Turner If you settled down to watch last night’s Panorama with a brick-sized bar of Dairy Milk on the arm of the sofa, the chances are it left a rather nasty taste in the mouth. Reporter Paul Kenyon got trussed up in his best Man from Del Monte finery and went undercover as a cocoa trader in West Africa, and the results were pretty shocking. Cocoa’s only been growing in West Africa for a couple of hundred years since sweet-toothed colonial powers took it over from South America, but the Ivory Coast and Ghana are now the world’s biggest producers. Sadly it seems a fairly hefty amount of it is farmed by kids – some as young as eight – who’re smuggled over the border from the poverty of neighbouring Burkina Faso to work long days cracking open cocoa pods with machetes. But surely the kindly men churning out our KitKats and Crunchies would something to say about that, right? Well, sort of. Kenyon found that one farm which uses child labour supplied a company selli...

Posted by Stewart Turner If you’re pitching a new TV troubleshooting show in the vein of The Hotel Inspector or Country House Rescue , the first thing you need is a fearsome matriarchal presenter. With Hilary Devey, a gruff Lancastrian who made her millions in the haulage industry despite once living in a poky flat above a chip shop, Five has struck solid gold. Each week brassy Hilary – a woman whose turn of phrase and straight-talking demeanour hint at a previous life sat behind a sewing machine in Weatherfield – will be dispensing some priceless nuggets of business acumen from underneath her immaculately-coiffured barnet. Oh, and showing off her implausibly big chandelier collection. First up for the Devey treatment were a couple of florists, going under the depressing moniker of “Leaf It Out” and operating from a deserted industrial estate in Milton Keynes. Unsurprisingly, they were losing cash and over fist until our hero dropped by to boom: “I’m Hilary, and I’m your busine...

Posted by Stewart Turner Clearly desperate to put to good use all that cutting-edge equipment gathering dust since Sir David Attenborough’s Planet Earth came to an end, the BBC’s costly cameras were wheeled out to capture some of the planet’s most baffling phenomena in glorious detail last night. And no, I’m not talking about Richard Hammond’s increasingly-ludicrous mid-life-crisis haircut. The premise of Invisible Worlds is that high-speed cameras can open the door to a flabbergasting hidden world which our low-tech peepers usually miss. The series opener was all about speed, and managed to take in enough big explosions to keep the Top Gear man on side – although there wasn’t a caravan or a cheap family car in sight. Indeed, Hammond wa...

Posted by Stewart Turner Another week, another attempt to squeeze a bunch of washed-up celebrities into the scuffed-up size nines of the common man. At the last count there were just shy of two-and-a-half million people who could’ve been asked to give us an insight into what it’s like to be out of work. Instead, the Beeb decided to enlist Larry Lamb, Meg Mathews, Emma Parker Bowles and Diarmuid Gavin to show us what it’s really like. Conveniently ignoring the fact that they weren’t actually jobless at all since they were picking up a cheque for making a painfully bad TV documentary, the gruesome foursome were stripped of their cash and stuffed into some of Primark’s finest before being sent out to various downtrodden towns to look for work. TV gardener Diarmuid did a sterling job in showing us how not to look for a job, skulking around the streets of Hackney eating bananas while telling strangers that he “needs some work to live” in the manner of a man who’s about to be committed...

Posted by Stewart Turner The old line about “foreigners coming over here and taking our jobs” has been trotted out since around the time Eve lost that fruit-picking position in the Garden of Eden, and politicians of all persuasions are always eager wheel out guff about “British jobs for British workers” if they smell a few votes in it. But do we Brits really want to do the jobs that’ve been stolen? That’s what Evan Davis attempted to find out - by plucking 12 long-term unemployed from the town of Wisbech and giving them a couple of days work while the immigrants took a well-earned rest. With 3000 foreign workers and 3000 unemployed locals, the East Anglian town was a perfect place to test the theory. It’s also a place of back-breaking work in stark asparagus fields and eight hour shifts in front of conveyor belts full of maris pipers – not exactly dream jobs by any stretch of the imagination. As the potato factory owner pointed out,...

Posted by Stewart Turner Not since Adolf Hitler invaded Poland has one person been as loathed by the Great British Public as Heather Mills. Never one to admit defeat, and obviously buoyed by her decent showing on Dancing On Ice , the much-maligned ex-Mrs McCartney clearly believes we’re still there to be won over. Whether an hour’s televised psychoanalysis is the right way to do it is another matter, although a few people would doubtless agree a session with an analyst was long overdue. And it didn’t take a swinging pocket watch or some word association to penetrate Heather’s innermost thoughts – by the end of the show she was practically analysing herself. We kicked off with a potted history of Heather’s much discussed childhood, which mainly centred on her violent, abusive dad, who was under the impression he was the dead German composer Richard Wagner. After her mum left, the abuse centred on Heather and her sisters. It’s hard not to be shocked at the upbringing and rotten luck ...

Posted by Stewart Turner After a few months out of the limelight courtesy of their brothers and sisters over at British Airways, it was the turn of that other British business behemoth to be thrust back into the public consciousness last night. Some six years after they exposed the full horrors of your average Royal Mail sorting office, the Dispatches team returned to see if things have improved. The answer was a predictably resounding ‘No’. It’s still a place where greetings cards are routinely torn open in the hope of snaffling some birthday money; and the back office is still a throwback to the bad old days of industrial strife, where workers will stage a wildcat strike if the management so much as propose changing the brand of teabags in the staff canteen. A couple of undercover reporters posed as casual workers to dig the dirt, and did a sterling job, never once taking delivery of a fist in the face despite giving every member of sta...

Posted by Stewart Turner Most commentators agree the Labour Party needs nothing short of a miracle to win a fourth term when the country goes to the polls in May – and if they were looking to veteran MP Austin Mitchell to win over a few hearts and minds and score a few political points in last night’s highly watchable Tower Block of Commons, they were sadly mistaken. The show rehoused four MPs – the Tories got two, for some unexplained reason – in grim, inner-city high-rises for a week to see how they coped with a slice of edgy urban life, rather than rowing a coracle around their moats all day and paying their children £30k a year to make tea and fetch HobNobs. With Mitchell’s insistence on getting his very own flat – all the other MPs gam...

Posted by Stewart Turner Last night’s Only Fools and Horses prequel was fantastic news for the three people who’ve been chuckling along to the post-Peckham exploits of Boycey and Marlene in The Green Green Grass for the past few years. For the rest of us, it was just another unwelcome attempt by the BBC to revive the twitching corpse of Del Boy and co rather than commission something new. There were some big-hitters on board for Rock and Chips , essentially the story of how Del Boy and Rodney came to be brothers and yet differ in height by about three feet. Nicholas Lyndhurst did a reasonable job of rattling through his lines as Rodney’s cut-price Kray dad Freddie the Frog, and professional rent-a-cockney Phil Daniels was fairly convincing as a middle-aged version of Grandad. ...

Posted by Stewart Turner Are you struggling to quit smoking? Is the entire surface area of your body plastered in patches as you suck up nicotine through a ridiculous-looking plastic tube? Are you reduced to a gibbering wreck prepared to sell sexual favours for 10 Benson & Hedges after just a few minutes of nicotine withdrawal? Well, if there’s one thing guaranteed to have you reaching for a fag and tearing up your New Year’s resolution for good, it’s the sight of a Five reality TV show where ropey “celebs” like Chloe Madely, Linda Robson and (shudder) Paul Danan attempt to kick the habit. Still not convinced? Well, also on board for Five’s two-night celebrity quitathon is disgraced TV “psychic” Derek Acorah – a man who surely has a bit of an advantage with spirit guide Sam on board to help him kick his filthy habit – and short-tempered chef John Burton Race, shown practically puffing smoke into his young son’s face at one point ear...

Posted by Stewart Turner It’s around 12 months since Saint Delia sullied her reputation by smearing a frozen burger with horseradish and calling it a Sunday roast in her much maligned How To Cheat series. In an effort to reinstall the First Lady of Food back in her rightful place, her latest vehicle celebrates the chef's five glorious decades in the limelight. Cue a montage of Delias through the ages, from the floral pinnied and bowl haircutted "sexy Home Economics teacher’ look of the '60s and '70s, whizzing through the ‘extra from Howard’s Way ’ years of the eighties and nineties, right up to the sizzled-on-sherry football fan we all know and love today. Indeed, a sprinkling of national treasures popping up at the start to proffer their praise for the venerable Mrs Smith did make me wonder if Delia Through The Ages would amount to little more than six half-hour instalments of simpering ego massage, but thankfully a kn...