Jamie's School Dinners (Jamie Oliver in general)

Member Name: jatkinson100

Product:	Jamie Oliver in general
Date:	13/03/05 (473 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Never says 'Pukka'., Will stop the bile rising in your throat every time you see him., He's not annoying 100% of the time.

Disadvantages: Forces you to think of him as a person., He's still annoying quite a bit of the time.

Jamie’s School Dinners has hurt me! Badly! When it came to Jamie Oliver, I knew where I was; I hated him. Lots and lots and lots. I even wrote a, I hope, amusing review of him and his original TV show on dooyoo (see http://members.dooyoo.co.uk/tv-programs/naked-chef -the/135682/ ). He has a horrible accent, a horrible personality and, generally, makes me want to wretch. The relationship between Jamie and I was easy: I hated him and he didn’t know I existed. I was happy with that. I felt it worked for us. I would have much preferred it if he’d let me carry on despising his face, voice and cooking without his having any idea that I lived and breathed. This is why I am so, so riled at his latest televisual offering!

My girlfriend, you see, likes him. I know, I know; “Why are you going out with such a cretin?” you’re asking, but a part from her penchant for this salad-tosser and monkey-faced Will Young, she is highly intelligent and has a pretty good taste in celebs. Any way, she decides that Jamie’s School Dinners would be a good thing to watch; I didn’t. We disagreed, I was slapped to the floor, we watched it. Oh my God! I hate myself for saying this, but I quite like him. At the very least, I don’t mind him. Only on this programme, mind. I’m not going to sign up to his fan club or become a regular viewer of his usual tripe (ha, ha – did you get the pun?), but he’s OK! Honestly, dear dooyooer, you were not as shocked as me. Here’s why he’s now off my Christmas letter bomb list:

The Premise of Jamie’s School Dinners:
Our school children eat rubbish! This is not as metaphorical as any of us would like to believe. Following on from people in mainstream entertainment looking at the diets of our kiddiewinkles (see my review on ‘Super Size Me” at http://members.dooyoo.co.uk/vhs-title-sp-sz/super- size-me-2004/1004437/ ), Jamie decided that he could make the lives of some of our capital’s students (and teachers) better by making the kids eat better. Starting off at one school, he tried the experiment, hoping to broaden it to a whole LEA. He looked at what the pupils got for lunch (deep fried mechanically reclaimed meat, in most cases) and saw how much fat, salt and E numbers were being pumped into their bodies each lunch time. He decided that it could be done better.

The Idea:
School dinner ladies and kitchen staff no longer cook. That’s about the size of it. Their job is to heat up 36p’s highly processed junk and serve it up. He decided that these pupils need to eat properly in order to learn and behave as well as they could. He went to it.

Early days:
Now, I’ve said I don’t mind him now, but watching everyone get at him, from pupils to catering staff, facing mass walkouts and protests (banners reading “Jamie out!” being paraded around the playground) and miserably failing to either get the food out on time or sell it when it did arrive, made me laugh. I didn’t like him. I hated him. He was failing. Cue hilarity on my part. Then something happened, just after my girlfriend hit me again for laughing so hard. “It’s not for my kids,” Jamie said. “Let’s face it, they’re not going to go to state school, are they.” I really, really had to fight to stop myself being overcome by his apparent altruism; I forcibly reminded myself that he would be getting paid loads for making this programme. However, I think that it was here that the initial seed was sown.

Research:
Jamie was failing! The kids hated the food that the kitchen staff hated making. Nothing else could go wrong. Jamie headed off to County Durham, one of the most unhealthy places in the country. There he visited a small primary school in a very poor area to see if getting them when they’re young would help. The majority of the kids’ only proper meal came at the school’s lunch time and having kids from this school go hungry was not an option. Here, he found the same problem of kids simply not wanting to try new things. It was very, very funny watching them tell him that their favourite meal ever was either chips, chocolate or Pot Noodle – his face was a picture of disbelief. He argued and cajoled and threatened kids, dressed up as a corn on the cob and made up a song. He cooked with the kids and got them to try their own stuff. Eventually he won them over. I’m regretting watching this programme as it was at this point that I really started to believe that he could be a decent human being.

A smaller experiment was on the family he stayed with; he asked them to give his kind of food a go, so no processed, salty, fatty foods for a week. The family saw little change at first, but as soon as they gave them some of the ‘old’ food as a treat, behaviour crumbled, with their kids screaming, shouting and being disobedient, all within half an hour of them eating this food. They knocked it on the head all over again. I liked the way Jamie summarised the events to the family’s mum; it went something along the lines of “So, when they had YOUR food, they behaved badly, but when they had MINE, they were good?” At last, a glimpse of the pompous, self loving idiot I knew and hated, but it just wasn’t enough for me – I still thought he was OK.

Back to London:
Jamie travelled back down south to see how it was going. The answer was not well, but not as bad as it was. He promised at the start of the experiment that he could feed the kids well on the 36p the catering companies got, but had to go cap in hand to the powers that be as this was not enough. It appears that his healthy options are not really that much more expensive, but cooking takes more time than heating up, and the cooks weren’t getting Jamie’s grub to the kids on time. They increased the money by a whopping 10p, or a similar amount, to pay for the extra preparation time need, and Jamie’s altruistic juggernaut kept on rolling.

The Kids’ Reception:
The pupils at Jamie’s school were still not happy, but more and more were coming round to the idea and, at least, trying the food he’d prepared. He got the hardcore, as he had in Durham, and got them to cook and then try the food. This, as with the primary kids, was a great success. He’d won them, and me, round.

Moving Onwards and Upwards:
Never one to underestimate his own talents, Jamie is now having a go a training 0 head dinner ladies at an army camp so that they can pass on their quickly gained knowledge to their colleagues and Jamie’s vision of a better school dinner can be rolled out across the area. Watching Jamie nearly crack as all these women got nearer and nearer revolt simply did not bring me the joy I thought it would; something in me, by this time had changed. I realised that maybe, just maybe, he was doing A Good Thing. Maybe this was altruism and not pure self promotion. Maybe Jamie Oliver is, and can be looked upon as, a person. Shocked? I nearly made anti-pasta!

Jamie’s Inner Sanctum:
I wrote some horrible stuff on my other review (see http://members.dooyoo.co.uk/tv-programs/naked-chef -the/135682/ ). I stand by it, though. I thought I saw JO for what he truly was; a self-promoting, annoying D-list celebrity. I think that, in many ways, he still is. However, I saw his home life in this programme. Gone were the horribly choreographed and stage managed quick dishes when his mates, or ‘mates’, turned up; here was life at chez Oliver. During filming, one of the Sunday newspapers had run a story about a Dutch waitress who claimed to have slept with Jamie. The effect on his wife was truly horrific. She was in tears, even though the stories were clearly unfounded. She spoke of her anger and impotence, and the horror of the thought of, in years to come, her children having to read these stories. Now, my other opinion is acidic, although I believe in the base of it. Jamie did not have fame thrust upon him, but is one of those breeds of people who seek fame. Does this mean that we can print and read lies about him? That’s too big a question for here. Does it mean that he deserves such a fate? I think not. However, in today’s society, the fame seeking minor celebrity must expect these things to go on, rightly or wrongly. I’m not sure that ‘well, you knew what you were getting yourself into’ is any justification, but it must be a factor. Jamie wants to be famous, and I think his wife does too; they are learning that there is a price for fame, and they showed just how dearly they are paying for it. Both of them know that there is any easy way to stop these lies; stop doing TV programmes. I don’t think that this is just or right, but it is a way out of it. What I do think is that they have made a choice to risk their happiness on money and fame; it’s a sad situation when this has to be done, and I’m not sure they’ve made the right decision. However, I did see people on his show that night. They, suddenly, were normal, vulnerable people, and not the attention seeking idiots I’d seen before. I felt empathy and sympathy. I felt for him and her. It was weird.

Overall:
Jamie’s School Dinners is a very good show, showing Jamie Oliver to be a person rather than a poor celebrity. It made me see him as a person, and a relatively decent one at that, rather than an idiot with a wooden spoon and bereft of personality. If you don’t like JO and want to keep it that way, then don’t watch this show. If you do like him already (why?), then do watch this programme and your like of him can only grow.

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