To eat well, you need two things: a palate and a set of teeth. The first allows you to differentiate between tastes, to ascertain what’s good and what’s bad, and the latter avoids your nourishment being limited to soup and blancmange. Both are also, in a way, the ingredients necessary for good TV. And Sky’s Julia, which stars Sarah Lancashire as the legendary cookery presenter Julia Child, has the former in abundance. But now in its second season, can Julia add some bite to the story of one of the 20th century’s most quintessentially cuddly figures?
Julia returns to find its heroine – the woman who taught America to cook – now a household name. Her cooking show, The French Chef, has aired to enormous ratings success, but Julia herself is absent from the adulation. She’s in France, working on a new series of recipes with her cantankerous collaborator Simca (Isabella Rossellini) while her producers at WGBH, and publishers at Knopf, eagerly anticipate her return. But things are not going entirely smoothly in Europe. “You’re always chasing something Julia,” Simca despairs. “Chasing something that you say Americans want!” But for all that Simca knows about French cuisine, it’s Julia who understands the American public of the 1960s.
