Channel 4 Friday: What a load of (anti-English) rubbish!

Channel 4 used to be edgy and innovative; now it just seems to churn out the same old formula programming and anti-English bias as all the other terrestrial channels.

Witness last night’s offerings. I caught a snippet of the Channel 4 News report on what I am henceforth calling the ‘English government’s’ [= the UK government in its capacity as the unelected government for England] new public-information campaign to combat obesity, ‘Change4Life’. Of course, if you didn’t already know that the Department of Health deals with health matters in England only, there’s no way you would have guessed from the Channel 4 report that this initiative is limited to England. They never once mentioned this fact, and referred to ‘national’ this and ‘Britain’ that, as if England and Britain were one and the same thing – which, with respect to health policy and this campaign at least, they manifestly are not.

For once, by contrast, the BBC got it right. The report on their news website correctly identified that the campaign related to England only, although it misleadingly suggested that the 2007 Foresight report on obesity related to the UK as a whole, describing it as “the largest UK study into obesity, backed by the government”. In fact, the report dealt with England only, as you can see for yourself here. The article also mentioned explicitly that Scotland already has a similar campaign of its own. The BBC 1 Ten O’Clock News did even better, making it clear on two or three occasions in its report that the Change4Life campaign and related statistics it referred to concerned England only. One of the illustrations even had a caption that read ‘Department of Health England’: a very pleasing, and accurate, juxtaposition of the official name of the government department and its territorial jurisdiction. Perhaps the BBC is finally getting the message; which is more than can be said for Channel 4, clearly.

Incidentally, the Change4Life website also goes extremely softly softly when it comes to broadcasting its England-only remit. On the home page, it does invite the visitor to: “Join the people across England who are already making a Change4Life”. This sort of wording is also typical of news reports that refer explicitly to England, including the above-mentioned BBC one: they say ‘in England’ at some point; but they don’t flag up in lights the fact that it’s an England-specific initiative on the part of the [de facto English] government. So much so, in fact, that visitors to the Change4Life website – attracted to it, perhaps, by the TV news reports that gave the impression it related to the whole of the UK – have to be informed at the bottom of a page about activities in ‘my local area’ that “Are you in Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland? This resource only covers England”.

What a contrast if you do follow the links to the campaigns in the other nations of the UK! The website for the Scottish campaign, ‘Take life on’, literally flags up the fact that it’s a Scotland-only initiative, funded by the Scottish Government: it is decked in the colours of the Saltire, with the flag itself in evidence in the top-right-hand corner of every page. Similarly, the Welsh campaign, ‘Health Challenge Wales’, couldn’t be more explicit about its Wales-only character, indicated – in addition to its actual name – by the mention on the home page that it is “brought to you by the Welsh Assembly Government”. And as for Northern Ireland, the opening paragraph reads: “Welcome to the get a life, get active website. We all need to be active, and most of us in Northern Ireland aren’t nearly active enough”. And the website is peppered with links subtly conveying its ‘national-Irish’ character through the colours of orange and green.

One wonders whether the people of England would be more responsive to this sort of government information drive if the powers that be paid them the courtesy of informing them that this was an initiative specially designed for England, addressing issues that are of concern to everyone in England. Better still, if the afore-mentioned powers were those of a properly elected English government. If they did this, perhaps there would be less of the instinctive reaction against the ‘nanny state’ condescending to us about our bad habits; because it wouldn’t be the UK state talking down to us from on high in Westminster, but a truly English government that we the English people had actually elected and which we might accept was genuinely concerned about the wellbeing of England – just as the campaigns in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have no qualms about emphasising the fact that they have been put together for their nations by their national governments.

And, incidentally, we should not be surprised by the irony that the English anti-obesity initiative is the last one to be launched, despite the fact that we make up around 85% of the UK population. Undoubtedly, this is linked with funding issues. Change4Life is relying on sponsorship from food producers and retailers, including brands that you would not necessarily associate with healthy eating but which will be able to make use of the campaign’s logo and branding on their products and in their stores: Cadbury, Kelloggs, Pepsi, Tesco, etc. Even so, there are concerns that Change4Life will still not be adequately funded. By contrast, the partners for the Scottish and Welsh campaigns include no commercial organisations but only publicly funded bodies and charities. Clearly, government funding for such initiatives is not an issue in those countries compared with England.

Later in the evening, I had the misfortune to watch most of ‘A Place In the Sun Down Under’, which followed the eventually successful efforts to find a new home for a family desperate to quit these shores for brighter horizons in Australia. I’m not sure that this sort of fayre is really what we need in England right now in the midst of a miserable midwinter and an even more gloomy economic climate. The programme extolled the virtues of the sunny Australian lifestyle and economic opportunities, which it contrasted favourably to the bleakness of life back in ‘Blighty’; and it gleefully reeled off the statistics about the thousands of ‘Brits’ that are flocking to a ‘better life’ down under. It’s enough to make you comfort-eat and build up those weather-defying fat reserves! (My excuse.)

I suppose many of my readers can relate to this couple’s wish to escape from dreary, misgoverned Britain, if only they had £265k mortgage-free to throw around! The programme went on about Brits getting out of Britain to such an extent that I completely missed the fact, garnered only from the Channel 4 website, that the couple were actually from Wrexham (in North Wales). So they weren’t so much desperate to escape Britain as to quit Wales! During the programme, I did in fact think that the wife sounded Welsh, although the husband definitely came across as English. In fact, the repetitive references to ‘Britain’ and ‘Brits’ naturally led me to think that the couple lived in England, as – I thought – it would probably explicitly say ‘Scotland’ and ‘Wales’ if that was where they actually lived: ‘Britain’ equalling England in Channel 4 speak. But then I didn’t think about the aspect that Scottish and Welsh people might ring or write in to complain about the negative impression that was being given about their countries. Better to just say Britain and let people think the derogatory portrayal related to England only!

Am I being paranoid? Maybe, a little. But the programme did gloss over the fact that the emigrating couple were from Wales and created the impression they lived in England. And there was so much negativity about ‘Britain’ (generally, a synonym or overlapping term for England) that it seemed to partake of the usual tendency to do England down. At the same time the programme constituted such a promo for Australia, you felt it must be receiving funding or other support from the Australian government. It’s as if it were saying to all us English folk seeking a healthier lifestyle: don’t bother with the English government’s half-hearted anti-obesity campaign, just de-camp to Australia, where you’ll get plenty of opportunity to ‘eat better, move more and live longer’!

Or you could check out Channel 4’s forthcoming serving of ‘The Great British Food Fight’, previewed after ‘A Place In the Sun’. Oh Gawd, I said inwardly; why can’t they just give all this ‘Great Britain’ malarkey a rest! Not content simply with the title ‘The Big Food Fight’ they used last year, they feel they have to stick the words ‘Great British’ in there to beef it up still further. Or should that be ‘pork’ and ‘chicken’ it up, as two of the episodes – presented by Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittenstall respectively – will be focusing on the ‘British’ pork and chicken industries. Not that I am an expert, but I would be pretty confident that most pork or chicken labelled in the shops as ‘British’ (and therefore, by definition, almost all ‘British pork’ and ‘British chicken’ per se) is in fact produced and processed in England. ‘British’ is just a brand for these meats, as one pork-industry website explicitly states. That is, it’s the brand used for English meat, as the practice of supermarkets such as Tesco – which is the subject of Fearnley-Whittenstall’s programme – is to label anything produced in England (including, in my area, local East Anglian pork and milk) as ‘British’, while anything from Scotland or Wales carries the names and flags of those countries. So when Oliver and Fearnley-Whittenstall take British pork and chicken producers and retailers to task, remember that the objects of their criticisms are English producers that have to keep their costs down to a minimum to remain afloat against a tide of cheaper imports.

In fact, there’s not much about the content or the celebrity-chef presenters of the ‘Great British Food Fight’ that is properly British, as opposed to English only, unless you count Gordon Ramsay as Scottish because he was born there. And that includes the ‘Little Chef’ chain of restaurants (described by Channel 4 as a ‘British institution’) that are going to get the Heston Blumenthal treatment, only nine out of 185 of which are located in Scotland. Intriguingly, 15 Little Chefs are also to be found in Wales (including one in Wrexham, I note); so, based on the proportion of Little Chefs per head of population, you should really call them a Welsh institution – but then again, safer to imply they’re English (which they mainly are, to be fair) by calling them British! In short, the Little Chefs are another fat-filled reason to leave Wales
the country England – or at least to upbraid it for its supposedly low-quality and unhealthy food.

And what is ‘British food’, anyway? It always used to be called ‘English food’ or ‘English cooking’, which used to be negatively compared with French or Italian cuisine. I suppose the sub-text is ‘English food used to be rubbish until it was transformed by numerous multi-cultural influences and the healthy-eating fad, and became “great British” food’. But note: no one is suggesting that the recently elevated status of British food is down to traditional Scottish and Welsh influences, which would be a justifiable reason to call it British. So even in its ‘new improved’, healthy, multi-cultural Britishness, British food is still largely English in origin.

Which, fortunately, cannot be said of the ‘Big Brother’ concept: the TV one, that is (which is Dutch), as opposed to the original inspiration – George Orwell’s 1984 – which is English. How very apt that this evening of British nanny-state doing down of the English lifestyle and diet – combined with the lauding of celebrity ‘British’ chefs campaigning to make our food healthier, more natural and more original – should culminate with ‘Celebrity Big Brother’: a veritable fusion, as they say, of the ethos of the Surveillance State and our supposed obsession with celebrity. It is indeed fitting that a channel that can serve up such a sustained diet of anti-English tripe should also produce a programme that reduces the real intrusion of the UK state into our English liberties and privacy to the status of a game show, and to prurient tabloid-style curiosity into the private lives of the rich and famous.

In so doing, they debase a medium that could and should be dealing with the real reasons why English people distrust their unrepresentative and paranoid politicians (who in turn distrust them), why they live so unhealthily, and why they are flocking out of the country in droves – such as: inadequate disposable income to spend on healthier food; the power of the big brands and supermarkets that sell the processed and mass-produced ‘British’ foods (and drive down the prices to English producers) in superstores to which we increasingly have few alternatives, as the big chains plus the recession are driving the small retailers out of business; our money tied up in over-priced, under-sized housing that we can’t sell; dead-end jobs (if we’re lucky), excessive working hours, a high cost of living and intense stress levels; and a growing gulf between the richest and the poorest resulting in envy of, and lust for, wealth and fame.

Oh yes, and the rubbish fayre and trashing of England served up by the likes of Channel 4.