Nic Hall’s Box Bosh

HAVE I missed the joke somewhere along the line? Was the email sent out while I was on holiday, because I can’t understand what the hell is going on in Nigella Express (BBC2, Mondays, 8.30pm). I had been spared the misery of watching Nigella before her current series, so in the name of Student Direct, I thought I’d tune in. What I was to find has scared me, and yet I keep coming back for more.

What is so galling about the show is that Lawson pretends she lives in the same world as the rest of us, bemoaning her busy days at work. I don’t know if they think we, the audience, are monumentally stupid enough to believe that Lawson, the daughter of the ex-chancellor Nigel Lawson, and husband of multi-millionaire, Charles Satchi, has ever done a hard days work in her life. We all know that the very work that she does do is making the rancid telly we’re watching, but the show contains endless supplies of Lawson sitting in black-cabs, clearly slaving her fingers to the bone.

She spends the time fawning around the kitchen making ‘express’ food, using “whatever she has in” which usually is the kind of rot that most of the population can’t even pronounce, let alone eat. One of her quick makes for when her “girlfriends come over” is to stick a poussin (a small chicken) each in the oven. I’ve never seen a poussin, let alone wok oil, sesame oil, and whatever else she uses in this particular recipe, in the supermarkets of the land.

Another especially jarring scene played out where she, feigning tipsiness, flounced in the studio (yes it is a studio set, and not her own kitchen) to make a quick-bite to fill the gap left after a night out. What ensued was hard-core cooking to create some form of toffee desert. I really can’t decide whether Lawson and the producers are just taking the piss, or they do actually stagger home and start a half-hour cook-up, or like the rest of us, buy a greasy takeaway.

The Appeal of French and Saunders has always somewhat exuded me, less alluring still is the thought of a Jennifer Saunders solo project, so it’s fair to say that I came to The Life and Times of Vivienne Vyle with pretty low expectations. It is, essentially, a satire of the Jeremy Kyle (Kyle/Vyle, geddit?) style chat show. It’s been hugely fortunate to ride the bizarre wave of hostility to the Jeremy Kyle show, sparked by Judge Alan Berg’s summation that the show was "human form of bear baiting". Why the outrage has only just started now, I do not know.

Kyle, along with other chat shows like Jerry Springer and even elements of popular entertainment shows like The X-Factor where in the early rounds it is socially acceptable to laugh at people with genuine learning difficulties perform to the judges are, and always have been, voyeuristic. In fairness to Saunders, the show does shed light on the murky side of television, and the first episode was reasonably amusing, but the show runs for seven weeks which will, I’m sure, prove to be too much for what amounts to a one-gag comedy. Even so, it’s still much better than most of the rest of Saunders’ stuff.

Send your views on Box Bosh to letters@student-direct.co.uk