Do high food prices still make us angry? That’s the question the latest episode of The Full English asks us. This less-than-a-year-old documentary podcast hosted by chef Lewis Bassett explores England through food, with guests who have included fellow chefs Margot Henderson and Andrew Wong, historians David Edgerton and Catherine Hall, as well as farmers, critics and food manufacturers.
We start with an astonishing fact delivered by economist James Meadway. “Over the last year, the average price of food has gone up 14.5%.” He explains that the cost of living crisis is the combination of prices rising quicker than overall inflation and wages rising slower. Brexit and Russia’s war with Ukraine are root causes too. Next, he looks into the history of food riots, including a protest in Somerset in 1801 in which increasing prices of basic commodities led to large crowds forcing fair-price agreements on producers and local magistrates.
Fast-forward to the present day: Bassett chats to people outside a Tesco in Rotherham, some of whom are skipping meals or opting for the cheapest products. He concludes that rising food prices are something they feel they can’t do much about, despite South Yorkshire’s history of radical food protests. There’s a lot to take away from this small but mighty investigation that doesn’t reduce the issue to Tory-induced austerity, but considers the various causes at play, from weaker trade unions to the changing nature of community politics to free-market capitalism.
With supermarket profits and food banks on the rise, it does make you wonder why this country doesn’t display fury and rage in the way it once did. As Bassett points out, markets are human-made, not products of nature or God. We do have the power to demand fairness when it comes to the things we need to survive, but perhaps decades of exploitation have warped our moral compasses so much that we’ve become accustomed to inequality. As one of Bassett’s interviewees outside Tesco says simply: “Something needs to be done, but I don’t know what.”
On a lighter food-related note, Nick Grimshaw and Michelin-starred chef and restaurateur Angela Hartnett return for the third season of Dish, described as “weekly dinner parties for more riotous fun and hilarious, unfiltered chat”. The guest on the first episode was US comedian Rob Delaney, best known for his roles in the TV show Catastrophe and the film Deadpool 2. Delaney’s jokes are quickfire as he talks about his Twitter-launched career and his love of peanut butter. “The other day, my wife had the last bit of peanut butter and I saw [the empty jar] in the rubbish bin … it wasn’t so much anger as it was shock.” He also talks about his book A Heart That Works, about the death of his son, Henry, from a brain tumour in 2018.
There’s something about Dish that doesn’t feel quite like a podcast. The audio seems like a daytime TV cooking show (that might be down to the audience’s laughter and clapping in the background). Not to get existential and ask “What is a podcast?”, but the good ones feel like being a fly on the wall during a candid conversation. Something about a good podcast compels the interviewees to reveal the kinds of things they wouldn’t say on This Morning or Steph’s Packed Lunch. Dish does post its visuals on the Waitrose YouTube channel and it’s a little more enjoyable in that format.
Here’s a show for poetry-lovers or, equally, anyone with a fetish for witnessing people under intense pressure. The premise of Rough Trade Books’s Stress Test is that the host and their guest each pre-select 15 minutes’ worth of songs. Before playing them, they decide on a lyric from one of the songs to use as a reference point for the poems. While the songs play, they write. They then read aloud their new poems before repeating the whole process with another round of songs. There are three rounds, so all in all, listeners will get to hear nine rapidly assembled poems.
The latest episode features hosts John Osborne and Ella Frears and special guest Sarah Fletcher, and the first round of poems uses the line “I’m the only one wearing a suit,” from The Copper Top by Bill Wells and Aidan Moffat. Frears goes first, her opening line as bizarre as it is imaginative: “I’m the only one wearing a suit … at the orgy.” By now, there’s an exciting anticipation for what their quirky minds will conjure up next, where their ideas might overlap or if they will take completely different paths, which is usually the case. The next round uses Stand By Your Man, and Fletcher’s list poem, which plays on the word “man”, is an ingenious use of the prompt. “A mannequin of scandals standing tall. A mantis praying for the fall of Rome.” This is great PR for the “poetry can be fun” brigade, of which I am a proud member.
Continuing the theme of writers under pressure is The Failing Writers Podcast, hosted by professional voiceover artists Jon Rand, Tom Turner and Dave Baird, who describe their podcast as being for “anyone who ever dreamed of becoming a writer… then went and put the kettle on”. With so talk of success stories, I first tuned in to this show because it was refreshing to hear people talking about procrastination, bad ideas and dreams not coming true.
The second season concluded last week with an episode in which the team pitched the treatment for their comedy drama sitcom Poker Night – an idea that they had come up with during season one. “These blokes turn up, drink, play poker, they’ve known each other for years, but they don’t actually really talk to each other.” When the pub owner decides to turn the pub into an upmarket French bistro, the men are forced to play poker at their homes and this makes them reveal more of their interior lives to one other. They act out the pilot episode. The dialogue is funny, though the props (dildos and nonalcoholic beers) yield the kind of narrative that is predictably laddish. Anyway, it’s all a joke, right? That’s until Rich, a commissioner at UKTV arrives to give feedback.
So what starts off as a bit of fun fortunately turns into an insightful free seminar on what to do and what not to do when writing and pitching a TV show. “You have to work quite hard to make them more richly, deeply casted. Give them a bit of vulnerability. An emotional edge to draw in the audience,” says Rich. He admits, though, that the script’s flaws could all be forgiven if they manage to cast Ricky Gervais. Overall, the earnestness of this show makes it a weirdly endearing listen.
