Gregg Wallace has joked that he “really enjoyed” his “first acting job” after his one-off mockumentary, The British Miracle Meat, aired on Channel 4 last night (24 July).
In the show, which Channel 4 said would see the MasterChef star “investigate a controversial new lab-grown meat product” that could “provide a solution to the cost-of-living crisis”, Wallace is seen exploring pioneering technology in the sales of “human meat”.
He visits a “human meat-harvesting plant” in Lincolnshire, and at a London restaurant he is offered “toddler tartare”.
While the mockumentary was created to raise awareness of the cost-of-living crisis and the lengths people will go to in order to keep their families out of poverty, many viewers thought it was in bad taste, and some even seemed to think it was a genuine documentary.
Posting on his Instagram after the show aired, Wallace wrote: “Thank you for watching. I really enjoyed my first acting job!”
For clarity, alongside a picture of himself on the programme, he added: “Satire. See Jonathan Swift ‘A Modest Proposal’.”
“A Modest Proposal” is a satirical essay written and published by the Irish author Swift in 1729, which proposed that the impoverished Irish might overcome their economic troubles by cooking and eating their own children.
The British Miracle Meat had mixed reviews from critics. In The Guardian, Lucy Mangan wrote that “it took a shamefully long time for me to work out what was going on”.
The Telegraph’s Anita Singh, meanwhile, called it “a Black Mirror episode stripped of cleverness and subtlety”.
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Food critic Jay Rayner, meanwhile, tweeted: “So @Channel4 is currently running a two-minute sixth form comedy sketch, as a 30-minute fake doc. Fronted by Greg Wallace. I mean. OK. On you go.”
The show is not the first mockumentary or fictional programme that has duped audiences into thinking it was real.
Viewers were so traumatised by the 1992 Halloween drama Ghostwatch, about paranormal activity, that it led to numerous children suffering from PTSD.
The 1938 radio drama The War of the Worlds, meanwhile, adapted the HG Wells novel into fake news bulletins describing a Martian invasion of New Jersey. Some listeners mistook those bulletins for the real thing and shared the false reports with others or called CBS, newspapers, or the police.
