Is an hour extended sufficient to travel the globe? Probably not, the producers of final night’s dispiriting documentary The World’s Very best Diet program (Channel 4) need to have agreed. Much better make it an hour and a half.
So it was at breakneck pace that our presenters, jovial Jimmy Doherty and perky Kate Quilton, set off to find the world’s healthiest cuisines. Specialists – off screen – had obligingly ranked 50 nationwide diets by goodness. Occupying the sinful reduced half have been the devotees of cola and corn-syrup: the Marshall Islanders brought up the rear, followed by Mexico, the US and Kuwait. At the finish of every tiny segment, a didactic minor voice summed up: “DON’T consume sugar. Bear in mind to consume vegetables. Do not skip breakfast.”
Overweight individuals of all nationalities waddled across the display incessantly till we reached the halfway stage at 25 and a trumpet announced the Dietary Equator: henceforth, stock footage would demonstrate only gamines.
I was a small unhappy to see the waddlers go what dispirited me more, even so, was the presenters’ cultural commentary, which began to downgrade from merely banal to excruciating.
A segment in Ethiopia was generally wince-producing. “This utilised to be a spot of famine and Live Support but it’s all much much better now,” grinned Doherty. The documentary was so “over” Ethiopia’s recurring famines (last critical in 2011) that it wobbled close to the territory of that spoof Mariah Carey interview: “I’d love to be skinny like that – but with no all the flies and death and things.”
Doherty challenged his Ethiopian host to eat an whole can of Green Giant sweetcorn with him and compare excretions the next day. Doherty’s digestive technique took a total twelve hrs longer to procedure the maize. The Ethiopian diet regime, it would seem, helps make for an inspiring colon. But it didn’t make for inspiring television.
Our short immersion in the establishing planet turned out to be tokenistic. In the ultimate evaluation, it was “clever old West”: the Mediterranean diet plan came in 2nd. Gold went to Iceland. (Fish, apparently.)
Some of this documentary’s flaws lay in the crass execution, some in the notion. Television can do marvellous things but if you ask it to tour the planet in 90 minutes, you need to anticipate to be served scene-setting cliché: the Eiffel Tower, cue accordion Christ over Rio, cue the Macarena rural Italy, cue – illogically, inevitably – Dean Martin.
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The World"s Greatest Diet plans, Channel 4, overview: "wince making"
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