You might not expect a programme called Gregg Wallace: The British Miracle Meat to cause much of a fuss. I certainly didn’t – how wrong I was. Presented by Masterchef star Wallace, the one-off special delves into a supposed new trend that’s sweeping British supermarkets: human meat, surgically extracted from donors living on the breadline. Wallace visits the factory where the meat is processed, samples steaks of human meat at a fine dining restaurant, and meets some of the donors personally, including young children. The programme is, of course, a fiction, devised by comedy writer Matt Edmonds, though Channel 4 opted to conceal the satirical nature of the broadcast ahead of time. The stunt worked. Some viewers took the programme at face value, or claimed to, and the night played out like a dark cannibalistic spin on Panorama’s spaghetti-tree hoax of 1957.
The British Miracle Meat is exactly the kind of headline-grabbing, dubious-taste satire that Channel 4 has turned to many times in recent years: just months ago, the similarly unnuanced Prince Andrew: The Musical song-and-danced its way onto screens. This latest special, though, seems particularly eager to push the limits of sensitivity. Is the cost of living crisis really appropriate mockumentary fare? Is it saying anything we don’t already know? The premise is made harder to swallow by the fact that The British Miracle Meat is not funny in the slightest. Scenes of downtrodden, financially desperate people being pressured into painful medical procedures are not wry but pitiable. Wallace himself – a man who recently quit his role as host of Miracle Meat-esque reality series Inside the Factory – is all too plausible as a banal, credulous cannibal propagandist.
At its most effective, satire is an energising force. It doesn’t just identify a problem but stirs people into direct action. The British Miracle Meat, however, is enervating. It’s a cry of despair squeezed through a deli-counter grin. Perhaps wary of bias accusations, Edmonds does not mention any political party by name – instead, the villain of the piece is the ethereal “cost of living crisis”, an enemy as expansive and relentless as chlorine gas, or Godzilla.
The British Miracle Meat can be forgiven, though, for brandishing its critique with sledgehammer tact. Cannibalism as socio-political allegory is hardly a novel idea at this point: the metaphor has been carved up in everything from sci-fi movies like Soylent Green, to Stephen Sondheim’s gothic musical Sweeney Todd (“The history of the world, my sweet / Is who gets eaten and who gets to eat”). Go back further, and there’s 1729’s A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift, from which premise The British Miracle Meat draws so closely that it gets a special acknowledgement at the start of the credits. Even compared to works like these, The British Miracle Meat is broad and obvious in its allegorising – but maybe this is necessary.
Increasingly, it seems as if the UK is impervious to satire. Since the Conservatives took power in 2010, our underfunded film and TV industry has yielded few works of any widespread socio-political resonance. Ken Loach’s 2016 agitprop film I, Daniel Blake managed to garner awards and something resembling mainstream recognition, but its ferocious condemnation of Tory welfare cuts failed to stymie real-world policy changes. Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror is perhaps the most prominent British satire of our times, but often avoids political specifics in favour of technological abstracts. Political bio-series like Brexit: The Uncivil War or Michael Winterbottom’s This England come and go without a trace. Meanwhile, several of the UK’s best politically conscious screenwriters have increasingly looked to ply their trade abroad, such as Succession’s Jesse Armstrong, or Veep’s Armando Iannucci.
In short, The British Miracle Meat may be exactly what we deserve at this point. It’s bleak, basic, and politically impotent. The Guardian wrote that the programme “practically vibrates with rage”, but rage suggests some kind of reactive impetus; Wallace’s sickly burlesque serves only to bewilder. The whole enterprise posits problems but no solutions, cuts close to the bone but neglects to sew you up again. The British Miracle Meat is the kind of satire you are left with when you can imagine no feasible avenues of change. But maybe it’s all we’ve got left.
‘Gregg Wallace: The British Miracle Meat’ is available to stream now on Channel 4
