Oh Victoria! Your anti-imperial blend just isn't my cup of tea:

Victoria Wood’s investigation into the history of tea was originally going to be called The Great British Cuppa.
Every other food show seems to have a patriotic title at the moment. Perhaps it’s the same all over the world, and in Moscow tonight they’ll be tuning in to The Glorious Vodka Revolution, while in Dusseldorf it’s Frankfurters Of The Fatherland.
But the BBC wisely ditched the jingoism, because much of the renamed Nice Cup Of Tea was an apology for Britain’s imperialist past.

 

Witty: The best bits of Victoria Wood's documentary about tea was when she was taken in by her surroundings as a traveller

To the backdrop of Chinese tea plantations, the documentary talked at length about the oriental opium wars. Hearing Wood tell it, anyone would think the Victorians set out to turn a billion people into heroin addicts, just so the curators of Kew Gardens could lay their hands on a tea tree.
In India, Wood fretted constantly about sexism in the Empire’s tea fields and the damage done to Indian traditions. In Calcutta, for instance, they didn’t drink tea until the Twenties, and now they’re all mad for a gungy brown liquid made by boiling condensed milk, tea leaves and sugar in a saucepan.
Every now and then, Wood forgot her undergraduate conscience and became a traveller, observing her alien surroundings and being swept along by the strangeness of it all. It’s a technique that makes Michael Palin such delightful viewing — and there were moments when Wood’s dry wit was worthy of Monty Python.
Sipping an infusion of tea flowers, she pulled a wry face and then reproached herself: ‘My palate was ruined by wine gums as a child.’ And watching a musical telling the 5,000-year story of tea in China, she sighed and said: ‘Honestly, it’s enough to make you vote Communist.’

Disastrous: Food Glorious Food's semi finals had plenty to enjoy but Carol Vorderman's presenting was one of them

It was sometimes better that her Chinese interviewees could not understand her asides. Introduced to a Madame Qi Ping, a 60-year-old matriarch with a severe black bob and two sets of knuckles loaded with jewellery, Wood muttered: ‘She looks like the love-child of Mary Quant and a Bond villain.’
The most astute comment came from chat-show host Graham Norton, who appeared briefly as a talking head. ‘Tea,’ he pointed out, ‘is a social drink: you make a cup of coffee, you make a pot of tea.’
If Victoria Wood was a gauche presenter, Carol Vorderman has been a disastrous one on Food Glorious Food. The cookery contest, dreamed up by Simon Cowell as a culinary version of Britain’s Got Talent, has flopped badly, drawing audiences well under the three million mark.
This semi-final episode had plenty to enjoy, in particular a 92-year-old marvel called Eunice, with a recipe for the perfect Cornish pasty, and a smashing bunch of students from a college for disabled youngsters, who had perfected a jelly stuffed with summer fruits and Pimm’s.
But the Vorderman touch killed the show. Last night she was wearing a dress with a scarlet hourglass shape stencilled on the front that looked like a comedy kitchen apron — the kind rugby-playing blokes wear at a barbecue.

 

The contest is being judged by 150 ladies of the Women’s Institute, and when Carol stood up in that outfit to welcome them, the stares of disapproval were icy enough to freeze a hotpot.
With their Best Of British series, the Hairy Bikers have developed a fail-safe formula that keeps them on air. When they first bowled up on their Harley-Davidsons, I thought they were good for two seasons at most: the beer-bellies-and-beards gimmick seemed weak.
But their double act has flourished. They’re like husband and wife. Si King is more masculine, taciturn, grumpy and intense, while Dave Myers is excitable, voluble, fussy and flustered.
They bicker incessantly, with such affection that it’s easy to imagine them repotting geraniums in the greenhouse, wallpapering the hall, or doing any of those things sacred to middle-aged, married couples.
And like any eccentric, forgetful husband and wife, they’re full of suspect information. Yeast extract, we were told, was developed for soldiers during the Boer War because it came out through the pores and kept the mosquitoes at bay. I don’t believe a word of it. But at least it sounds suitably patriotic.