“I’ve got to be honest with you – I’ve never done anything like this before. I don’t even know where to start.”
Can I be equally honest? If you find these words being uttered in your documentary, stop. Go back. Scrap everything. Just bin it. It won’t do. Consider yourselves worthy of more than this kind of lazy, contemptuous programme-making. Because, at this late stage of the game, we surely are.
Let The Big British Beef Battle, presented by the normally excellent Ade Adepitan, be the last of these pointless hour-long pieces of drivel that waste the time of everyone involved – and everyone who sits before it expecting to be informed, enlightened or entertained.
Adepitan has apparently been seized by the need to act in the face of the climate crisis. You can spend much of the programme wondering whether its shoddiness is better explained by this being a genuine new passion of his – and him hoping the full-heartedness would somehow carry the day. But unfortunately it doesn’t change the product.
Which is dismal. A few facts are assembled: 25% of the average Brit’s carbon footprint can be attributed to the food they eat. And 58% of THAT is down to the meat element. Raising beef produces 10 times more greenhouse gas emissions than raising chickens does. The methane the billion cows on the planet burp and fart is 28 times more harmful a greenhouse gas than CO2. And then there are all the trees and rainforest cut down to hold the cows and to grow the soy and corn on which most of them are fed. Ergo, the best lifestyle change an individual person can make for the planet is to stop eating beef.
So Adepitan “would love for everyone in the UK to stop eating beef”. But the UK likes beef. We are told that “it’s British, it’s tradition – and it’s been that way for ages” and shown some adverts to prove it. “I want to change a culture,” announces Adepitan. What’s the best way to achieve this? A sticker, he thinks, with slogans on. “Say no to beef. Chicken produces seven times less carbon emissions than beef.” “Say no to beef. Beef is killing our planet.” He is thrilled. “Short, succinct, to the point!” They are, in marketing or sloganeering terms, unmistakably none of these things. But they allow him to go to a supermarket and slap them on a few packets of mince and burgers until he is escorted from the building by security staff who seem like they don’t even care that the planet is burning! The effective criticism in programmes like these of ordinary people just trying to do their jobs is a pet hate of mine. It should so clearly be avoided.
When the stickers don’t work (“They actually seem to annoy people”), it is time for a nanosecond’s interview with – of all things – an expert in climate crisis communications, George Marshall, who just has time to suggest that Adepitan finds a group of people who he might be able to inspire and who might then, by the power of group-identity dynamics and peer-to-peer influence, go on to change their ways.
Adepitan finds a loo-roll factory in Manchester (I think so he can make a “both dealing with bullshit” joke) whose canteen head chef, Rob Evans, uses 35kg of beef a month to feed hundreds of employees. In a move that puts the whole programme basically beyond redemption, Adepitan shouts at the diners through a literal megaphone to “Put down the beef! Beef is killing our planet! Put it down now!”
What are we to make of this? That Adepitan really is this stupid? That the programme-makers think their audience really is this stupid? That anyone on the (dying) planet has thought for a moment that this is a way to bring about momentary, let alone long-term, significant change in someone’s behaviour? Unless you include in “momentary change” the act of thumping someone who is shouting in your face through a megaphone.
Back to Marshall we go for some more vital pointers. We end with an ostensibly uplifting but actually stupid, pointless social experiment and credits roll. You sit back and ask what, precisely, that was all for. And hope that maybe with some accompanying articles and interviews and – well, any other stuff that isn’t the actual programme – some awareness of the issue might be raised somewhere.
The Big British Beef Battle is on Channel 4.
