TV review: Food Inspectors; Wonderland: Two Jews on a Cruise

http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2012/feb/29/food-inspectors-tv-review

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I did a basic food hygiene course once where the instructor leaned over conspiratorially and said that he had examined the rice in the local Jamaican restaurant and found five different types of sperm. Whenever you tell that story, someone goes, "I heard that about my curry house." An Australian said she'd heard it about her local Indonesian. I therefore formed the view that food inspectors are inveterate racists. This is how circles of hatred are formed. Thank God neither of us has a country.

Matt Allwright and Chris Hollins actually seem nice enough, on <strong>Food Inspectors</strong> (BBC1), but they start with bootlegged booze, the first in a series of totally baffling decisions. The only dramatic thing about watching hygiene laws being contravened is when they find poo in the fridge, or tiny paw prints in the butter – you know the kind of thing we're after. I can think of a whole menu of stomach-churning things; I would scream out loud if I saw a live mouse. But a bottle of hooky Jacob's Creek with an incorrect spelling of "Be Alcohol Aware"? My eyes, my eyes! How could "aware" possibly start with an O?

"In some parts of the UK, one quarter of retail outlets were found to be selling counterfeit booze." This is worse than a bad statistic, it is actually an anti-statistic: in which parts of the UK? A single postcode? Four counties? A quarter of how many? There were some nice touches, though, like the man standing up in his food-inspector overalls, saying soberly, "We were alerted to this problem by two alcoholics, reporting that vodka from a particular shop was burning their throat." There's a "big society", for you, when even alcoholics can be bothered to alert the authorities in the proper way. And sure, it's not good for you, fake alcohol. It looks a bit scary, it makes you vomit; in large quantities, it turns you blind and can even kill you. It's a bit like real booze, in other words. Real booze that burns your throat and can't spell. It is a very serious offence buying fake booze off the "white van man" – the inspectors keep telling us that, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Nothing really happens, except that the inspectors tie the fakes into plastic bags and stalk out of the shop with neutral expressions, like they've just come out of duty free in Dyslexia Airport. For their next trick, I hope they go round corner shops looking for bags of Wotsits reading "Not to be sold singly" that are being sold singly.

It wasn't all about alcohol; there was a very handsome officer in a single mum's kitchen, telling her sternly that there were three times as many bacteria round her sink as there were round her toilet seat. "Who cares?" said her tired eyes. "I wonder what your hair looks like under your funny hat." Finally, Lisa Wareham in Reigate hounded an Indian restaurant about their E coli readings (well, OK, this is not great), and made them throw away their yoghurt because it was past its use-by recommendations. The manager countered that he could tell when it was off by smelling it. My head was with her, my heart was with him.

My stomach told me to skip the curry and proceed directly to the Jacob's Cryaike.

<strong>Wonderland: Two Jews on a Cruise</strong> (BBC2) reunites viewers with Gaby and Tikwah Lock, highly orthodox Stanford Hill residents who featured in a documentary last year about a Hasidic wedding. I wondered ungenerously at the start whether this would have got past the commissioning stage had "Jews" not rhymed with "cruise".

But of course there is tonnes going on. There is the fact that, across the decades of their married life, they have never been on holiday. There's Gaby's tendency to hoard (he goes in for what they call clean hoarding, not squalor hoarding, though the food inspectors might have their own ideas). There are the 613 commandments they live by, which result somewhat circuitously in a lot of wigs.

Gaby explains to the narrator how it's a tenet of the Jewish religion that you make yourself as attractive as you can to your spouse; the narrator replies, with what I think we can call a Theroux-ian faux innocence, "What do you do to make yourself attractive to Tikwah?" and she kills herself laughing, from under her funny-shaped wig. Here is a couple you could go on a cruise with.