Gok Wan: Too Fat Too Young / Horizon: Why Are Thin People Not Fat?

Yet more food-based television for you.

Bet you can’t wait. Like the TV Execs who commission this stuff endlessly, I reckon your hunger for this junk-TV is insatiable. TV is your feeder and you, reader, are its BBV (Big Beautiful Viewer).

So first up, Gok Wan. Channel 4’s Mr Charisma – otherwise known as ‘him again’ – manages to tell us very little of any substance over the course of fifty minutes apart from the fact that he was once absolutely bloody enormous. 21 stone of Gok. If you didn’t see it, all you missed out on were a few historical Gok-shots of Mr Wan when he was obese, wobbling about on a stage with a 90s curtain-cut. Not amusing, not particularly revelatory, just a little bit voyeuristic. All the stuff surrounding it left no real mark, so this ended up as just an anti-vanity piece by Gok – a slice of self-flagellation cum self-congratulation with no real purpose other than to strengthen his resolve not to eat pork pies ever again. Bizarre.

And so we move to BBC2’s latest Horizon offering – Why Are Thin People Not Fat?

I switched this on whilst eating two quarter pounders, chips and mushy peas. It’s a moronic question to which the only logical answer I could muster was ‘because they’re thin’, through a mouthful of masticated junk-cud. Swiftly followed by ‘now stop asking stupid questions and put a sitcom on’.

The brief for this show was to feed a handful of skinny students shitloads of cake and monitor them to see if they put on weight, which they did, in varying  amounts. One kid’s extra input turned into muscle (the lucky swine), one kid grew a massive gut and most just grew love-handles. It was another tiresome example of the Spurlock Effect, in which lazy Producers, lost for ideas, nick the format of Supersize Me for the umpteenth time and film the predictable result.

Some vaguely amusing shots of the young ‘uns gorging themselves to the point of nausea aside, the rest of this was straight-faced fat-facts. It essentially comprised so many differing schools of thought on why some folk are pre-disposed to weight gain that it rendered them all meaningless, with no discernible conclusion amongst the wildly opposing scientific theories.

Pah! Thanks a lot, ‘science’!

The kids lost the weight without any effort after two weeks. Gok lost all his girth years ago. BBC 2 and Channel 4 lost all their substance when this obsession with food robbed us of decent televisual output, which snowballed the minute Jamie Oliver, the Naked bloody Chef, made food trendy – and for that I reckon we should burn the bastard at the stake.

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Tags: BBC 2, Channel 4, Culture, Diet, Eating, Entertainment, Gok Wan, Horizon, Media, Television, Too Fat Too Young, TV, Weight, Whay Aren't Thin People Fat?