Old published stuff

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...