The BBC: this is what you pay for

A strange article by William Langley in the Telegraph is an encomium to Nigella Lawson: ‘La Stupenda of the blender’. I don’t know if it also supposed to be some sort of insult to Dame Joan Sutherland.

Incidentally what do you think about a man called Nigel naming his daughter Nigella? Just a little bit...um...Still, it is the name for the flower Love-in-a-mist which is nice if cheesy.

Which brings me on to the programme, which by a miracle of modern technology I managed to watch, Nigella’s ‘You know it makes sense’.

Ms Lawson enters her Belgravia kitchen wearing a denim jacket, a garment so preposterously unsuited to her image and figure as to make you sure it was some sort of statement, without knowing of what. The kitchen is a mixture of the old and the modern, with endless rows of fairy lights, as if Marguerite Patten were sharing a flat with Liberace. Perhaps that is what is going on here. There is an element of the 1950s ‘hostess with the mostest’ about her act.

Ms Lawson is larger than life, and at times, with some deft camera work, of which there is an unnecessary amount, larger than you would have thought possible. I remember that when she tried unsuccessfully to make a success in America a critic warned that it was impossible in that country to be successful with such a big bottom. It is not however her bottom that we have forced on us: the camera is fixed on, one might say fixated by, her substantial bosom. Some might like it, some might not, but in a culture obsessed by slimness it looks odd. Again, you might feel – I did – that it is regrettable that it looks odd; a tubby male cook looks cheery: ‘let me have men about me that are fat’. Then you realise it is not her size, it's the way she dresses. A 1950s negligé suitable for the seaside landlady chatting up the gentleman in Room 3. Whatever, odd is what it looks.

Not as odd, however as her facial and verbal expression. In between awful clichéd homilies – ‘I love the kitchen’, ‘I believe in life you take your pleasures where you can’ her full lips and perfect teeth form a welcome-to-my-world smile so patronising that you want to cough up ‘my short pasta and salami stew’. ‘I love thinking about food’ (huge soupy smile) ‘I love cooking food’ (h.s.s.), ‘I rather like eating food’ (h.s.s.). You should be as lucky as Nigella.

I watched the programme aghast at its awfulness. It is a commonplace to criticise Italian television but Berlusconi at his worst would be quite incapable of producing this bilge.