Few people will have been happier yesterday with headlines such as “Channel 4 fans fume as Gregg Wallace ‘ends career’ after eating ‘human meat’” than Gregg Wallace. Taking advantage of his overbearingly cheery persona, the presenter has pulled off one of the best hoaxes in media history with his bogus documentary The British Miracle Meat.
Success in these cases is usually measured by tabloid outrage, feigned or otherwise, and threatened complaints to Ofcom, but Wallace’s sting operation successfully fooled, provoked or at least surprised nearly everyone. Perhaps it is proof that, although it is losing ground to streaming services and social media, broadcast television still has the power to move the dial – but let’s not be too hasty.
For the uninitiated, The British Miracle Meat took us on a tour of the secret Lincolnshire factory of Good Harvest, an innovative food company providing cheap, fresh meat sourced from humans. “It may well be the meaty miracle we need to ease the squeeze of the cost of living,” said Wallace with, well, not quite a straight face – more his usual wide-eyed, exaggeratedly enthusiastic face – as he learned how hard-up Britons could earn extra cash and feed the rest of us by having chunks of themselves removed surgically and grown into cheap cuts of meat. By the time Wallace got to the children’s wing, where the tenderest human flesh was being farmed, most viewers would (or should) have smelled a rat.
In fact, The British Miracle Meat was a 21st-century spin on Jonathan Swift’s 18th-century satirical essay A Modest Proposal – in which he suggested eating babies as a solution to hunger in Ireland – but the show was presented as a straight, factual documentary. It worked a treat. Some outlets even published reviews of the show before seeing it, dashing it off as standard, three-star light-factual entertainment.
We have become accustomed to declaring that “satire is dead” or that events are “beyond satire”. Admittedly, in an era when the US president would rather alter a weather map with a marker pen than admit an error, the job is difficult. But perhaps The British Miracle Meat tells us it is not good enough to blame “reality” and give up. Satire can still be an amazingly powerful tool when it is done cleverly – and television remains a particularly effective medium for it.
Today’s media-saturated landscape has made us more sceptical yet more credulous; it is very hard and very easy to fool people. People will conduct an armed raid on a pizza joint in Washington DC in the mistaken belief that a secret paedophile cabal is operating out of the basement, simply because they read it on the internet. But, at the same time, surely we have all watched enough mockumentaries and constructed-reality shows to assume we know how to separate fact from fiction.
In addition, we have put up guardrails to ensure that satire has to work harder than ever to cut through. An indicator of the state of things came in November, when Elon Musk acquired Twitter and swiftly ditched the “blue tick” marker of authenticity on accounts of high-profile people or organisations. The inevitable result was a deluge of parody accounts impersonating those high-profile people, including Musk. The comedian Kathy Griffin changed her handle to Musk’s and tweeted that “he” was voting for the Democrats in solidarity with women whose rights were being stripped away. Satire was alive!
Musk failed to see the funny side and quickly stipulated that all parody accounts had to announce themselves as “parody”, thus defeating the fundamental principle of parody – that it is only effective if it can be mistaken for the real thing. Satire was dead again.
It is no coincidence that The British Miracle Meat was made by Channel 4, the birthplace of hoaxes such as Chris Morris’s Brass Eye and Sacha Baron Cohen’s alter egos Ali G and Borat. These shows successfully tricked public figures into saying embarrassingly stupid things.
An early wink in Wallace’s show refers to the human meat as a “cake” – reminding viewers of Morris’s fictional drug of the same name, the dangers of which he got MPs and public figures such as Noel Edmonds to commentate on earnestly (and cluelessly). By a similar token, Baron Cohen’s empty-headed “urban” youth persona Ali G tied many a public figure in knots over political correctness, while Borat has continued to skewer American targets, most recently in 2020’s Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, which made a laughing stock of Rudy Giuliani and others.
But British television regulations have made satire more difficult. Alf Lawrie, the head of factual entertainment at Channel 4, said recently that “you couldn’t make Ali G, Borat or Brass Eye now”, because Ofcom has tightened the guidelines around contributors. People being pranked in such shows have to be informed beforehand about “potential risks arising from their participation in the programme which may affect their welfare”.
In some respects, that is just as well. But, as with Musk’s insistence on flagging “parody” accounts, it ruins the joke before it is made. “We’re far more respectful of our contributors now than we used to be. But it means the nature of some satire has changed,” said Lawrie.
Instead of pranking its participants, however, The British Miracle Meat pranked the audience, which is more fun – at least, if you weren’t fooled by it. “We were trying to prank people in a gentle sort of way,” says Tom Kingsley, who directed the show. “I see it more like giving people a treat. How exciting to watch telly and be like: ‘Hold on, am I just seeing something that’s completely unlike anything?’ It’s hard to get that sort of special feeling of surprise, watching a show.”
In terms of fooling the public, the most successful spoofs are the ones that mimic the form of their medium imperceptibly. Swift presented A Modest Proposal as a serious, rational argument, just as Orson Welles’ announcement of a Martian invasion in 1938 was indistinguishable from a genuine radio news announcement. Similarly, the 80s gorefest Cannibal Holocaust, the original “found footage” horror movie, was so convincing in its depiction of Europeans being devoured in Amazonia that its director, Ruggero Deodato, was thought to have killed his actors; he had to bring them to court to prove they were still alive.
The British Miracle Meat’s spiritual ancestor is probably the BBC’s notorious 1992 special Ghostwatch, which fooled viewers into thinking it was a live broadcast beset by genuine supernatural forces, aided considerably by the participation of ordinary presenters who would never be in on this kind of thing, including Michael Parkinson and Sarah Greene.
The British Miracle Meat looks the kind of show we have seen a million times before: a lightweight piece of factual entertainment in the vein of, say, Supermarkets Unwrapped or Inside the Factory (which is presented by Wallace). It is all there: the upbeat presentation, the heavy use of incidental music, the accessible analogies (“the size of four football pitches”), the graphics, the second-fiddle presenter (in this case, Michelle Ackerley) doing vox pops in the street. The participation of Wallace seals the deal – he is not the kind of guy who would be part of a sophisticated joke … is he?
“It’s not just about our society; it’s a satire of TV as well,” says Kingsley, who usually directs comedies and dramas, but had to watch an awful lot of this kind of factual content to nail the tropes. “These shows purport to be telling you something like ‘this is how biscuits are made’, but really you’re being given a very narrow window into the process. We’re not given very much context; anything troublesome is overlooked … TV can provoke and educate and inspire, but it can also just fill your time without delving into anything complicated.”
Kingsley speaks admiringly of Wallace for agreeing to make The British Miracle Meat – “he was really excited to be doing something new” – and for his work as a presenter: “People think: ‘Oh, he’s just this guy who goes around asking people questions about stuff that he probably doesn’t know anything about.’ No, he’s the smartest person in the room. Because he knows all of the answers.”
The British Miracle Meat reveals something else about satire – especially TV satire. In a 2013 essay for the London Review of Books, the author Jonathan Coe blamed popular shows such as Have I Got News for You for facilitating the rise of Boris Johnson and his brand of politics. Johnson was often criticised on Have I Got News for You by the regular panellist (and Private Eye editor) Ian Hislop, only to be let off the hook by a well-timed, tension-defusing joke.
TV satire has its value – but it can serve more as a cathartic release for viewers and listeners who feel powerless to change the status quo. The target is often vague, the response a collective “what can you do?” shrug. Rather than being a solution, in other words, it is part of the problem.
What makes Wallace’s cheery survey of consuming human flesh so effective is that it is focused and angry. It is speaking very much about modern-day Britain: “How the government is uncaring and neglectful and, in particular, how the most vulnerable people in our society are expected to solve their own problems and private companies are encouraged to step in and profit off people’s suffering,” as Kingsley puts it.
One hapless “donor” in the show, who lives with her unemployed husband in a decrepit house she can’t afford to heat, is being paid “two weeks’ worth of energy bills” in return for a pound or two of her flesh, in a procedure that she is told is “pain-subjective”. Another is undergoing the “extraction” so he can treat the black mould in his house. The show is peppered with details that speak to how dystopian our reality is already. “The cost of living crisis and the unfairness of it is genuinely upsetting and horrible, but it’s something that we just kind of accept, that just seems normal,” says Kingsley. “Any decent satire should make you feel afresh that anger – that, no, this is wrong, this is not how society should be run.”
• This article was amended on 26 July 2023. An earlier version said Alf Lawrie was formerly head of factual entertainment at Channel 4; in fact, he still holds that role.
