TV review: Culinary excesses of the greed-is-good decade

Published on Monday 15 June 2009 21:07

THE SUPERSIZERS EAT… THE 80S BBC2 THE SECRET LIFE OF THE AIRPORT BBC4

ACCORDING to Wikipedia (so it must be true), the discontinued sweets Spangles have become shorthand for a type of lazy nostalgia, as in the phrase coined sarcastically by Stewart Lee, "Ooh, do you remember Spangles?" The Supersizers Eat… The 80s was basically a whole programme of "Ooh, do you remember Ice Magic? Do you? Ooh, do you remember Viennetta? And Pop Tarts? And Pot Noodles? And Wispas?"

Well, yes, in fact, as most of them are still around. Unlike their previous programmes, where they've eaten wartime rations or medieval feasts, Giles Coren and Sue Perkins were going back to a culinary period within their own lifetimes and from which much would be familiar even to younger viewers. Coren was fascinated by the process of microwaving a plastic container of sweet and sour chicken which was clearly a novelty to him, but probably a good proportion of those watching would have been eating out of one at the time.

The pair argued that much of what we eat today springs directly from the influence of the 1980s. Possibly true, but nevertheless the main reason for choosing the time seemed to be as an excuse for Perkins and Coren to dress up in ridiculous outfits, which they did gamely, from power-dressing Yuppies to glammed-up New Romantics.

The Supersizers may have given itself over to Spangles nostalgia this time, but it is a really well-constructed series. It crams in swiftly-delivered information, silly costumes, dodgy-looking grub, quintessentially 80s faces (Norman Tebbit, Peter York, author of The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook, who has been living off the decade ever since, Carol Decker out of T'Pau) and easy-to-digest snippets of pop culture.

Even if you don't feel especially interested in the subject at the start, it bounces along so amiably that it sucks you in, much like Perkins' comment on Pot Noodles: you know there's not much nutrition there but once you've started one, you may as well finish it.

Perkins is particularly good at vividly describing the food: the booze-soaked sponge fingers of a tiramisu were like "Tampax soaked in paraffin" and she was overcome by the memories of desperate disco evenings accompanied by lurid blue cocktails. Meanwhile, Coren, who tends more to the smug, recalled how his parents (his father was the journalist Alan Coren) used to spend 250 on trendy but tiny nouvelle cuisine dinners. "If only they'd saved it," he moaned, "I wouldn't have to make TV programmes now – I could be living in a castle."

The Secret Life Of The Airport took a much more BBC4 approach to recent history: no presenters acting the goat, just a bullish voiceover by Philip Glenister, lots of talking heads and some archive footage. But this sequel to the excellent series Secret Life Of The Motorway was far from dry, exploring the real strangeness of these spaces between places – so identical, so bright and outside normal time or climate – with interesting details and dreamy speculations.

All airports look so similar, apparently, because they copied the first truly modern one: Templehof in Berlin, Hitler's showcase, which encouraged continuous circulation, herding people with signs.

There's something uncomfortable about that thought, but airports have also given people freedom – their very uniformity makes the world smaller and more accessible. Yet their growth has led to unsustainable environmental pressures. And, as the fascinating story behind Heathrow's construction revealed, the teething problems and controversies of Terminal Five were nothing new.