I’m dreaming of a very white very posh Christmas

What we learned from tonight's telly:

a Christmas hamper of posh foodies

Nigella's Christmas kitchen: I decided to skip over the artifice of the whole affair and see if the food is any good; well she started off well with most of the programmes including hard liquor in various forms. Most cooking programmes are content to sniff the odd glass of wine (never beer mind) but Nigella made a martini with the merest hint of lychees liqueur in it which looked good.

Other cocktails just involved pouring booze into jugs excellent. The food was the usual over the top stuff all fairly doable. If you can bare a show with more theatrical winks than Frankie Howerd in summer season and parties full of Nigella's fake friends its harmless Christmassy fun. One thing did start to pall tonight they dubbed the hubbub of a party over the festive shots sadly it sounded more like a staff canteen than the noise the 6 or so people artfully snuggled round N's table would make.

Before Ms Lawson was a repeat of Rick Stein's Christmas food heroes which was the usual stuff Rick goes round the country enthusing about food not much to say really although I could have done without another lecture from Rick about people wanting cheap food, multi millionaire foodies like Rick and Hugh ex Etonian-complicated name going on how the rest of us should order our pheasants from the local wood is just tiresome.

Last up and most annoying is Willie's chocolate starfish Christmas Infomercial: this is one channel 4 annoying lifestyle programmes which is just an extended advert for which ever upper middle class twonk business is on the show. People complain about the poshness of Nigella's faux lifestyle when Willie's and his even posher wife's lifestyle is "real" and therefore even more tiresome filled with semi staged nonsense and shots of his ever so kath kidson aspirational posh people lifestyle (with every recipe with added chocolate of course).

One dodgy point earlier on Rick visited a stilton factory and had to wash and cleanse his hands etc before going in Willie blithely wanders onto his factory and starts doling out homemade mince pies to the his factory staff mmmmm lovely 80% coco butter chocolate with added spit, pastry crumbs and bacteria somebody call the environmental health. Or maybe these are faux eastern Europeans in his faux factory.

To finish off the tosh the film company shipped in a snow machine to gild that bit more the lives of Willie and his spoilt brood, gilded like his un-ironic gold flake encrusted (chocolate natch) cheese cake.

Sorry I'm forgetting myself this is the season of goodwill to all men but can't we make an exemption for poshboy ex ad men and there so called "cottage" industry foodie empires.

Oh and the hilarious killing the turkey story was lovely too.

By public demand

The Searchers

Checking my site stats and as usual they are often more perplexing than enlightening.

God love the place but I'm not sure anyone really wants to see "Porn films made in Barnsley"

Can I also clear up an important medical point if you want to cure a boil don't use Turkish delight go here they are right proper doctors and that.

the next selection I'm calling "long dark nights of the soul":

What new levels of depravity would lead someone in City of London at 3am Sunday morning to search for "naked Pictures of Lynne Perrie"! It makes the regular search for "Julia Bradbury in stockings and boots" seem rather vanilla, don't you think?

More Lentils Yentob!

What we learnt from last night's Telly!

Nigella eating with friends of her own age shocker!

Last night the manic Ms Lawson had Alan Yentob and Wife (?) round for tea, for the first time in this series it looked natural, as I can believe they would be friends (in real life not "Nigella real life" where you get a cab to go to party "round the corner" but you know "meat world" the one with air and dust and that)

Still no sign of hubby Charels, was that really a lamb casserole or was it longpig ?!

Lastly is Alan Yentob turning into a "post modern meta being", he increasingly appears as Tv Alan almost like Jon Malkovich does in the eponymous film. I fear he may be character in Douglas Coupland novel or a bizarre experiment cooked up by Jacques Derrida.

I love soup me!

ooops!
I'm having a pang of conscience, particularly as I've mislead almost a thousand people in their search of being creative! I spoofed Nigella Lawson sadly poor new series after last weeks episode sunk to new levels of inept kitsch, falsity and sheer strangeness, all that soup drinking! If you are looking for a recipes for Hokey Pokey for Nigella Express BBC2 go here it's just the same, a butter less toffee unlike most of the recipes on the web.

ps. I think one thing that made this recipe so popular apart from everyone liking crunchies is it only has 3 ingredients.

secret recipe

Just been looking at my stats, don't say I don't know how to give the public what they want.

Recipe for Nigella Lawson Hokey pokey cinder toffee from BBC2 Nigella Express.

Feeds: one hungry cookery writer, a film crew and a cab driver.
Chatty engaging preample:
You can get the ingredients from most supermarkets but Iceland is best ( I usually pop down in a Hanson cab) as they do multi-packs of crunchies.

1. With a sharp knife (make sure it's organic or a least free range) remove the outer wrapper of the crunchie.

(l love this bit it always reminds me of something my Granny use to say "posh people keep all their money by being too cheap to take flowers to a friend's house when they have sweated for hours to cook them dinner (sorry supper,)")

2. Next carefully slice off the chocolate. (I like to save this to eat late at night with some mustard or maybe you can use it to make "tiffin cake" which I call "rocky road" because we sell this programme to the americans).

3. Next take the last toffee hammer in Britain and break up the hokey pokey.

4. Now if you are going out to dinner (strangely as married person on your own) you may need to distract the host so I put the toffee in a nice tin (which I'll embarrisingly asked for back off my friends at the end of evening, even though my friend had her heart set on it)
that or use the ash tray from a 1960's camper van I lifted mine when I was boosting the cooler box from Jamie Oliver's split screen camper.

5. Lastly enjoy the crunchie sorry hoke pokey in the back of the cab in between swigs of pea and ham soup from your special Disney's Black hole flask.

Ps if you can't find real crunchie maybe if fairs in town you could buy some of that stale cinder toffee , the candy floss man use to sell. That had been in a dusty bag for a few weeks and just scrapped off the roof of your mouth, in preparation for a chewy stale brandy snap, and for lastly losing a tooth on a rock hard sour toffee apple.

Anyway I've got to dash and eat some goat curry in a lift before picking the kids up from councilling, they are having problems living in an alternative universe full fo fake "friends" a false replica of my house and where their step dad has completely disappeared.


Meanwhile on channel 4 Jamie is climbing trees with an elderly Italian man and later over on More 4 Gordon Ramsay has a sperm test.

Oh you've come back the credits have just finished and Nigella has popped back to microwave a rustlers Ranch burger, which she crams with tunnock caramel wafers and washes down with some apricot Yop.
You don't think she's eaten her husband do you?

oh I wish you could smell this

What we learnt from tonight's telly.
Nigella Express:

God love her but Nigella’s new series is trying my patience. It seems she’s not only a good cook but also a time traveller, seeing as she swanned around in tonight's show on a routemaster although they stopped being used on most regular routes almost 3 years ago.
She’s also in contravention of :

TFL Conditions of Carriage

12.1.3. You must not bring with you anything that:
• is likely to cause injury or offence to other customers

By eating sesame noodles on the bus she's breaking the bylaws. It’s a fact no matter how gorgeous a Chinese dish maybe if you are in a packed bus someon else's smells rank. The sickly peanut mixing with sesame urgggh!

Also can we stop with the product placement for your "salad serving hands".

Also if you are going to pretend to have "friends" get some your own age. 12 year old researchers don’t live in glamorous West London basement flats. Also they would you think you are a right weirdo cheap skate, if you turned up for dinner with some "crunchie" (sorry cinder toffee no sorry we are being twee aren't we "hokey pokey" ) instead of at least 2 bottles of wine.
And lastly what’s with drinking soup all over place, like a demented bus spotter.

Just to be even handed how many times is Jaime going to use his spice shaker before he’s done for product placement? I thought a fuck off stone pestle and mortar was "v' fing" for knocking up "sum of me old pesto" Jaime? (see naked chef series 1-4)

And finally things in Burma’s must be really bad as the BEEB have sent in Fergal Keane to cover the story. A man who’s never knowing under emoted. A man who is also never less than 5 words away from saying “poignant” or “”humanity”

Things we learned from tonights telly.
I was wrong about mushy pea canapés as Nigella knocked up what she insisted on calling avocado houmous, but was really mushy pies on rye bread.
The other things we learned was she seems to have a girls night in with what looked like 3 19 year old students ! Also she can’t cook a steak.






It's great when you are straight:

Saw Shaun Ryder on the Factory Records documentary and when he's not smacked out of his gourd he's a funny coherent raconteur , may be the drugs didn't work.



Later across town in a tv studio

The excellent comics Britannia hit a few bum notes. I know time is short in these programmes but 2000AD, a comic which has been going for 30 years deserved more than 15 mins coverage, just showing Judge Dredd really narrowed the view of it’s influence.
I think Alan Moore deserved his own programme. That way we could have had more space for other artists. Lastly an overview of British comics that doesn’t even mention Neil Gaiman in passing is like a Uk film round up not mentioning Hitchcock, very odd indeed.
Oh and did the Beeb get Charles Shaar Murray as a block booking?

On the whole a really good series and a good introduction for those less in the know (unlike spods like me). The best thing was seeing the artists themselves talk about their work and the work that inspired way in simple enthusiastic ways .

Ps: Alan Moore should get a gig reading on the revamped jackanory.