TV has gone cooking mad. Rick Stein’s got a new show on. The River Cottage is back on the box. BBC2 is making Indian food look like a piece of cake (not literally you understand) and now, Channel 4 has a couple of new shows to whet our appetites. As this is Jamie Oliver related, I’ll throw in a ‘pukka’ and a ‘lush’ to get your chops ’round.

Jamie At Home (Channel 4, Tuesday, 8pm) sees Oliver moving away from the preaching of his high-profile school-dinners campaign, and looks to his own kitchen for simple inspiration. This means cooking up things that he’s grown himself in an impossibly lovely looking garden. That’d be the kind of garden that you or me could never aspire to have. In saying that, I could never aspire to be a footballer anymore, so a big garden shouldn’t influence my viewing…

Oliver has gone from being a diamond geezer, to a more homely equivalent of… well… a diamond geezer. When he first burst onto our screens, he talked so excitedly that he could barely keep the saliva in his mouth. Backed by 3rd division indie bands like The Stereophonics, Jamie hopped around in his kitchen showing us how to make Botham Burgers and how to get hammered from watermelon. Then, the mid-section of his career saw him donning a suit and going bothering MPs about the food our kids are shoveling into their huge yawning gobs. So what’s he like these days?

Well, Oliver has moved with the NME. TV execs will probably stroke a chin and say ‘Jamie has grown with his audience, and thus, with music being an integral part to all his shows, the music reflects that’. That basically means that our Jamie has stopped listening to Ocean Colour Scene and now digs the bland musings of people like Paulo Frutini and James Blunt (not rhyming slang). Gone are primary coloured tees, and in is the gear that makes him feel a bit hippie-ish. Of course, Jamie Oliver is far removed from hippiedom, but he reeeally likes acoustic guitars these days (man).

With this new image, Oliver is no longer to be seen acting like a wide-boy dahn ver market, shining apples on his thigh and chirruping ‘Awight gov‘?’ Now, he’s ambling through his gigantic garden and talking to his gardener (a real hippie). At one point in last nights show, I thought he was going to pull a bong out and start talking about how heavy The Man is. Thankfully/sadly, it never happened.

So onto the food. The new Jamie (or should that read Nu-Jamie seeing as I’m using student pop-rag the NME as a point of reference) has tossed aside simple hearty food in favour of things that look decidedly more rustic. However, this is not without it’s problems. The RadioTimes refer to one of his dishes as “a tomato consommé that, in its early stages, wouldn’t be out of place as blood-spatter in an episode of CSI” before quipping “a sensational ragu baked in a brick outdoor oven that looks like a doll-sized crematorium.” When I read things like that, I convince myself that the RadioTimes have been reading my articles.

Nevertheless, Oliver cooks up this peasant food (very in right now) and gets all giddy. The wobbly camera shots are still there (an Oliver trademark) as is his excitement for food. Y’see, it’s hard to hate Jamie Oliver. Like no other chef in recent years, Oliver made cookery accessible. Although some of his ideas are hardly staggering, he’s still managed to get people trying new things out. Hell, some people might actually think he’s cool.

This show, much like Jamie’s herb garden, is going to take a couple of visits to bed-in. It’s not a terrible show by any means… but it’s not great either. If the currency of a cookery show is making the viewer hungry, then he failed (with me at least). If it’s true worth is to inspire me to stop eating Pot Noodles (straight from the tub with no water on), then again, he didn’t really succeed. Still, I’ll give it another chance. [Mof Gimmers]

[image c/o Getty]