The premise of Joe Wicks: Licensed to Kill (Channel 4, Mon) was a good one, though. With the help of Chris van Tulleken, the doctor who wrote the bestseller Ultra-Processed People, Wicks set about making and marketing a protein bar. He used ingredients that can cause dementia, cancer, stroke, obesity, type 2 diabetes, diarrhoea and premature death, which doesn’t sound and certainly didn’t look appealing, but these are the same ingredients the ultra-processed food industry uses routinely.
Add a little cacao and orange flavouring to the industrial gloop and the Killer bar was ready to go. Why? Wicks wanted to show how bad ultra-processed food is, how easy (and legal) it is to pass it off as healthy and then, having sold 3,000 of his bars, force the government into regulatory action.
Then Wicks had second thoughts. Was it wise to sell food with potentially life-shortening side-effects to the unsuspecting public? Van Tulleken was convinced. “If you run this only as a thought experiment you’ll be doing what I’ve been doing for the last ten years and I guarantee nothing will change,” he told Wicks. “You’ve convinced me,” Wicks said, but he hadn’t.
The resulting product had a buff, healthy Wicks on one side and a dying Wicks on the other, the Grim Reaper hovering on his shoulder. As the first episode ended he was preparing to take the bars to market, but with labelling (and an accompanying press pack) that made it clear what was going on.
We can’t blame Wicks for bottling it. He’s got a nice, big influencer empire and a nice, big house, both of which were on display. “The Body Coach’s health bars can kill you” is not a headline he wants to read. Except it is, isn’t it?
As Wicks and Van Tulleken illustrated, 60 per cent of the national diet is highly processed. Supermarket shelves are full of these deadly products. Could he not have sold his bars and only then told his customers what they had eaten, given that what they had eaten was the same as what they usually eat? Probably not — he already lost thousands of social-media followers after the well signposted stunt became public.
Clearly we don’t like being sold food that could kill us if the person selling us the food is doing it to make an important point. If they are doing it to make a profit, though? Fine. Mad.
Television historians and random posters on Reddit are unsure which programme first had the bright idea of doing a celebrity version. It might have been Family Fortunes or Bullseye. If you apply strict criteria such as it has to have the word “celebrity” in the title, it could have been Big Brother. It doesn’t matter, though. It happened and now it feels as if every game show, reality show and show in which people sell stuff has to have a celebrity version.
* Joe Wicks: My fight against UPFs and why fat jabs aren’t the answer
You have watched ordinary people try it, now bring in the celebrities with their better clothes, better hair, better teeth, better camera awareness — just better. It’s television’s class system and it makes me want to vote for the Trots.
Most of the first half of the first episode of The Celebrity Traitors (BBC1, Wed, Thu) felt like an advert for Land Rover interrupted occasionally by “sleb” introductions. Because this is the first celebrity edition there are some quite good ones (Celia Imrie, Jonathan Ross, Joe Marler), some quite ubiquitous ones (Tom Daley, Stephen Fry, Paloma Faith) and some quite Clare Balding ones (Clare Balding).
There was just enough self-awareness on display to make it watchable — Ross has always wanted to kill a celebrity, Daley might do it with his knitting needles and so on. And of course the host Claudia Winkleman, all catwalk Rocky Horror, treads the line between farce and suspense expertly. Did I say suspense? I did because, spoiler alert, that’s what there was when Alan Carr was given the task of murdering a faithful in plain sight.
As a parlour game Traitors is presumably more fun to play than watch, except that watching Carr, consumed by nerves, trying badly to pull off a poisoning, much to the frustration of his perfectly poised co-conspirator Cat Burns, was gripping, dammit. It even made up for the bit where Balding had to pull a horse up a hill. So now I’m hooked.
It’s the first series of Worlds Apart (Channel 4, Tue), in which pensioners are paired with young people to complete challenges around Japan, so we had to make do without celebs. Can two generations bridge the gap and work as one?
It’s a nice idea — people named Colin and Barbara paired with people named Aaron and Tende trying to navigate not only the culture shock of Tokyo but also the realisation that these old/young people might have their uses. You can feel the hand of the producers — of course they have picked these people carefully — but away with the cynicism. I found it heartwarming.
* Read more TV reviews, guides about what to watch and interviews
Frauds (ITV1, Sun, Mon), on the other hand, not so much. Because it’s on ITV we get the everything-including-the-kitchen-sink approach to drama. It’s a heist movie. It’s a buddy comedy. It’s about redemption. It’s about life after a diagnosis of terminal illness. It’s about girl power, coercive control and addiction. It’s the lot.
Jodie Whittaker continues to try hard not to be the Doctor and largely succeeds as one half of a conwoman outfit. Suranne Jones is covered in prison tats but is otherwise Suranne Jones with a few good lines such as: “Live, laugh, love? Die, hate, cry, more like.” (I thought that was original until I noticed it’s available on a pillowcase online.) Over the remaining episodes, as they plan to steal The Great Masturbator by Salvador Dalí, no teachable moment will be untaught and no exposition left unexposed. And I’ll continue to watch it, but only during the long ad breaks on Motorway Cops.
Rod Liddle is away
