Stephen Jardine: Jamie Oliver using the wrong ingredients for cooking up any interest in British grub

I’ve long been a fan of our favourite TV chef. Jamie made cooking acceptable to a generation of young men who otherwise would only have opened the fridge to get a beer.

In tackling the problems with our school meals and America’s obesity epidemic, he walked where our politicians fear to tread and he didn’t need to do any of that.

In short, he is a natural treasure who has an acute sense of what is right and hasn’t put a foot wrong – until now and his new TV series.

You can see how it happened. Jamie has a deal to deliver a book and a TV series to help sell the book every year, in time for Christmas. In the past that has taken him to America, Spain and Italy, but this year with a new baby, they needed to find something to do closer to home and so Jamie’s Great Britain was born.

Before you get carried away with thoughts of Cornish pasties, Bakewell tarts and Arbroath smokies, remember this is a Channel 4 series, so multiculturalism is the most important ingredient.

Instead of cheery farmer’s wives rolling pastry or ruddy butchers preparing pork pies, the first food we saw was a Vietnamese roll, served up by two beautiful Asian girls. Perhaps that is part of the British way of eating in the streets around Channel 4, but surely nowhere else.

Cut to a traditional East End pie and mash shop full of salt of the earth types who looked like they did their drinking down the Queen Vic.

There was a vague question mark over the future of the premises but that was skirted around with a throwaway remark that “things always change”.

In fact, Robins pie shop is closing after 48 years because of lack of demand for the traditional East End food. Another shop owned by the family has just been firebombed three times in three weeks.

That’s an interesting story that deserved to be explored but it didn’t fit the narrative so it wasn’t even mentioned. Instead, Jamie continued his journey in the converted army truck that the genius producer has decided should be his wacky mode of transport for this series.

As he sat chopping onions in the back with the log oven belching hellfire heat, I swear I saw in his sweat-stung eyes a wistful memory of his days on a Vespa when everything was cooler.

The final indignity came on Southend beach, where Jamie had to cook seabass in a foil parcel for his mum, dad and elderly nan. The significance of this dish to British regional cooking was never explained. Jamie was too busy trying to get his mum to admit she had conceived him at the end of the pier.

The only person to retain her dignity was nan, who kept her head down, said nothing and chewed on her seabass with the look of someone determined not to lose their dentures on national television. And then, it ended. In the past Jamie has explored the food of other countries in an entertaining and informative way but apparently traditional British food is just too dull for Channel 4.

What an opportunity missed. There is a great story to be told about how British food emerged and developed but our favourite chef didn’t get the chance to tell it.

We deserve better – and Jamie does, too.