The overwhelming likelihood is that you didn’t watch Gregg Wallace: The British Miracle Meat on Channel 4 on Monday night. After all, why would you? It was trailed as nothing special; just another identikit food-based filler documentary, the likes of which have propped up pre-watershed TV schedules for years. There was nothing to separate it from, say, The Hidden World of Hospitality With Tom Kerridge (BBC Two, 8pm, Thursday), or The Secret World of Biscuits (Channel 4, 8pm, Friday), or even Supermarket Unwrapped, the show that directly preceded it.
Even if you did watch, you probably spent the first few minutes letting it wash over you. There was Gregg Wallace, marching through a factory with a hairnet on and hollering like the world’s friendliest asbo recipient, as he’s done countless times before. There was a deluge of statistics, plonked upfront to justify the next 30 minutes. Things were measured in football pitches for relatability. There was a superfluous secondary female presenter for diversity. All the tropes were present and correct. Nothing out of the ordinary at all.
So the question is this: if you watched Gregg Wallace: The British Miracle Meat on Monday night, at which point did you realise that you were watching the new Ghostwatch?
Was it when Wallace mentioned that he was visiting a company that sold “engineered human meat” as a way to combat the cost of living crisis? When a scientist revealed that the meat had to be grown from slices of flesh that had been surgically harvested from actual humans? When Michel Roux Jr learned that he was about to become a cannibal and, instead of reacting with horror, became excited about its terroir?
Maybe that didn’t even sway you. You might have made it all the way to the hideous, horror-soaked ending, when Wallace learns that the most delicious meat comes from children, who we then see screaming and thrashing in pain as meat is extracted from their bodies.
Or maybe you spent the whole show half-watching as you scrolled on your phone, and never once twigged that Gregg Wallace: The British Miracle Meat was actually one of the most audaciously satirical spoofs ever aired on British television. You didn’t realise you had watched a scripted black comedy about poor people being forced to sell their bodies for food, presented as a documentary and released by its broadcaster without so much as a wink.
It was all so terribly plausible. Aside from a couple of wobbles, mainly in slightly too broad performances, so much of The British Miracle Meat was note-perfect. Most of this is down to Matt Edmonds’s script, which managed to hit all the genre beats without collapsing into absurd Brass Eyeisms. But there was also the detail-heavy direction of Tom Kingsley, who honed his craft on mockumentaries such as BBC Three’s Pls Like. Channel 4 deserves a lot of credit, too, since dozens of lesser broadcasters would have lost their nerve and given the game away much earlier. Even Wallace managed to sell the hell out of his role, his unrelenting chumminess helping to camouflage the gruesome Soylent Green nature of the show. In its execution, it was flawless.
But it was also uniquely disturbing. Other shows have tried to trick audiences like this in the past. Ghostwatch traumatised a generation when it was broadcast in 1992. A 2018 episode of Inside No 9 toyed with the idea of a live broadcast gone wrong, and fooled a lot of people in the process. Adult Swim has a nice history of tucking full-blown horror movies inside innocuous infomercial slots at 3am. But there was something so furious about The British Miracle Meat that it seems destined to eclipse all those examples.
The anger of it will linger for years. Anger that food has somehow become an unaffordable luxury. Anger that people are so used to taking second jobs that they don’t blink at the thought of having some of their flesh removed for cash. Anger at Brexit, at the meat industry, at every horrible corner that has been cut in the name of austerity in the past decade and a half. Anger at television, too, for its willingness to slap a famous face on an issue and consider it dealt with.
Go and watch it again. The show practically vibrates with rage. This was a proper, full-blooded roar of a satire, the kind we barely see any more. Not that I watched it live, of course. Who watches Channel 4 at 8.30 in the evening any more?
