Jamie’s Return To School Dinners

Jamie’s Return To School Dinners (Channel 4, 18/09/06) saw the nation’s favourite Mockney, Jamie Oliver return to check the state of school kids grub, one year on from the last series.

The show started rather gloomly with Jamie finding out from Nora the dinner lady that since her kitchen had stopped buying in turkey twizzlers that they are £20,000 in deficit and her staff are having to work harder than ever.

Slightly disheartened, he set of to see if he could get the campaign back on track.

So he set up an initiative in Lincolnshire (where school kitchens went out Margaret “Milk Snatcher” Thatcher) to let local businesses cook hot lunches and then bus them into schools. The first pub to try it out proved to be a bit of a dud. The chef Steve – a dab-hand at the nouvelle cuisine lark – tried to get away with lousy hygiene, poor ingredients and rubbish excuses (“I hit the woods running – but there’s a light out there.”) Jamie and Nora managed to sort him out eventually but then the pub manager decided to pull out of the scheme! Thankfully, another local pub stepped in and saved the day.

Jamie also had a bit of a rant at parents: “I’ve spent two years of being PC about parents. It’s kind of time now to say, you know, if you’re giving, you know, very young kids bottles and bottles of fizzy drink you’re a fucking arsehole, you’re a tosser. If you give them bags of fucking shitty sweets at a very young age you’re an idiot.” This apparently was set of by Jamie talking to a young mum off-camera who was bottle-feeding cola to a one-year old baby! She was telling him apparently that she couldn’t make a shepherd’s pie because it was “posh”.

He met with this week’s Education Secretary Alan Johnson who said he couldn’t ban junk food from schools because it was an “issue of personal liberty” or make any spending commitments beyond 2008. “Does that mean our boys are going to be out of Iraq after 2008?” retorted Jamie. Nice One!

Following on from the meeting with Johnson, Jamie was given an audience with Tony Blair who looked slighty dazed and confused. Jamie managed to squeeze out a commitment for more money to be thrown at the problem and that a nationwide group of school kitchens would be established to become centres of excellence. Result!

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