Watch family X "attempt to slash their food bills" while being patronized by the BBC! (Economy Gastronomy)

Member Name: worst_trip

Product:	Economy Gastronomy
Date:	20/08/09 (129 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: They say the recession is ending, so with luck they're unlikely to make another series of this tosh

Disadvantages: Please see accompanying review

For all the wrong reasons, I'm quite a sucker for programmes in which fat folk, ahem, that is to say persons with weight-related health issues are told by po-faced TV presenters to try and not shovel so much fried food and chocolate bars down their gullets on such a regular basis. Despite its name, "Economy Gastronomy," which - unless there is sport or international atheletics or something better on - currently airs at 8pm on Wednesday nights on BBC2 is a programme following exactly this tried and tested format. Based on its content this show has to be one of the most inappropriately titled things I've seen on telly since the last series of 'Celebrity Masterchef' (in which not one of the purported 'celebrities' was anyone the average person in the street would have been able to discriminate from someone you might have seen hanging around your local bus-stop) since"Economy Gastronomy" is definitely not, contrary to first expectations, a show that tells you how to prepare gourmet food on a budget.

No. We are firmly in the realms of 'how to make a basic tomato sauce for pasta from canned ingredients' territory here. Heston Blumenthal and his latest amuse-bouche of fish-and-chip flavoured ice-cream with black-pudding coulis and a Cadbury's Flake bar stuck in the top it is most decidedly not. Each week on the show two astonishingly un-charismatic presenters chortle and heckle at the dietary habits of a family of 'ordinary folk' - people who presumably have been specially selected by the BBC for their ability to looked cowed and docile throughout the filming, and to never answer the appalling presenters back - with the alleged aim of cutting down the family's weekly / monthly expenditure on food.

Instead it all comes across as more a case of laughing at what the ordinaries are spending their hard-earned dosh on. While this is certainly eye-opening - with the best will in the world, £70 a week on crisps, nuts and sugary snacks does seem a bit too much for anybody - who are we, the viewing audience, to comment e.g. on the little boy we saw in the first programme, who eats nothing but grey Doner-meat from the kebab-shop for his dinner three times a week? It's not great by any standards, but I'm sure he has his reasons. That his 'busy, working Mum' was at the start of filming, incapable of even dishing up a basic plate of boiled pasta in cheese sauce might well be one of them - but then we don't know the full situation. Quite possibly the good lady found better things to do with her time.

So after the featured family's bad eating habits are revealed in all their 'Mums-shop-at-Iceland' fuelled, mostly frozen-ready-meal and pizza packed glory, the awful, alternately Diamond-Geezer-bloke-ish and grinning-fiend-like 'Economy Gastronomy' presenters sweep in and resolve to save the family X-thousand pounds per annum off their grocery food bill. They did this in the first show by instructing the busy-working-Mum to prepare a gigantic vat of basic tomato sauce, into which could be added cheap or low-grade ingredients (such as, I guess, frozen pet-mince and so on) later in the week in order to make a whole range of tomato-sauce-based dishes. How the presumably gallons and gallons and gallons of basic sauce that they made at the start of the week were to be stored for a full seven days, guarding against spoilage in the interim, was not a subject that was at any stage addressed on the programme, (although perhaps this will be covered when the godawful patronising book-of-the-series comes, as it inevitably will do, out in the shops). Given that the sort of family targeted in 'Economy Gastronomy' seems to consist of quite - shall we say - culinary-naïve people, the omission of this very relevant point of health-and-food-safety seemed to me to be a rather big mistake.

At the end of the programme they show the usual footage for these shows of the now-reformed family thanking the presenters nicely, before all noshing down on salad (while obviously dreaming of a nice greasy takeaway) and such. So it's all oh-so-neatly tied up at the end of each week.

The real mystery is where on earth they find the poor hapless stooges to beat over the head with their own eating habits, who feature on these lifestyle and diet shows week after week after week. I watch programmes like this in largely the same frame of mind that I might sit through perhaps 10 to 15 minutes of a teen-slasher film late at night; that is to say, feeling thoroughly ashamed of myself, yet being oddly mesmerized by the mean-spirited awfulness of what I've tuned in to watch.

Summary: Show's BBC tagline: "Family X attempt to slash their food bills while improving their diets"