Janet Street-Porter: A radical idea: decent service in a British pub

Is there an any more self-satisfied bunch of people than pub landlords? Most of these unsavoury characters seem to feel that they are doing us a favour by opening their doors, allowing us to enter their (frequently) grubby, poorly lit and badly decorated hostelries, and then charging us a fortune for thin red vinegar masquerading as wine and inedible food at odd hours.

I've lost count of the number of times I've arrived in a pub in the middle of nowhere at 2.05pm to be told by some smirking overweight berk behind the bar "we stop serving food at 2 o'clock", in a triumphant tone of voice. In other words, any customers who aren't their usual group of fawning locals are thoroughly unwelcome. God forbid they should consider themselves to be performing any kind of service - that is an alien concept to the pub landlord.

I have long imagined that under middle England there is a vast catering hangar, from which enormous quantities of deep-fried fish bits, soggy chips, flavourless iceberg lettuce, slimy beef casseroles and pod-shaped chicken breasts that ooze rancid butter when pierced are despatched to public houses in packs via subterranean lifts. A fantasy maybe, but how else can one explain the uniformly horrible nature of pub grub?

There are some wonderful boozers all over Britain serving well-cooked food and excellent wine by the glass. But they are more than outnumbered by places like the one we found so entertaining in the television comedy series Men Behaving Badly.

As such, the news that Gordon Ramsay is thinking of expanding his empire into pubs that serve food is simply wonderful. I would love to be a fly on the wall when Gordon starts training his new bar staff. The concept that the customer has any rights, let alone might be right, has never occurred to most people who run pubs. Gordon, on the other hand, is driven by only one thing: a crazed desire to achieve the highest standards possible, to provide the best value and the best eating experience to his clientele. He genuinely wants them to be happy, to feel they have had an enjoyable and memorable meal.

I spend a lot of days on the road filming all over the country, and I can honestly tell you, that from Aylesbury to Swindon, from Doncaster to Bradford, pub chains just offer cheap booze, happy hours, loud music, and nasty reheated or flavourless food. Charisma-free zones. The only pubs that ever have home-cooked food are owner-run, quirky, and few and far between. For too long now pubs have operated with too little competition.

Thank god Gordon is going to change all that. Even something as simple as a sandwich is a disastrous experience in a pub. We're talking sliced bread, mini packets of mayo, horrible garnishes of thick-skinned tomatoes and raw sliced onion, and grey old beef that was cooked ages ago. Having just taken part in Gordon's telly series, The F Word, I spent time with the man, who is even ruder than me, and it was a salutary experience. Gordon is an egalitarian - he has garnered seven Michelin stars and run restaurants in luxury venues like the Savoy and Claridges. The man is on a mission to raise standards for us all.

Al Murray will have to rework his hilarious pub landlord comedy routine - incorporating the bizarre idea of a new breed of hosts who care about their customers, as well as serving something that didn't pop out of a microwave.

'Ethical' M&S could do better

City experts reckon Marks & Spencer's ad campaign encouraging us to shop ethically is its most successful.

The ads promote a range of products from coffee to clothing, line-caught scallops to food that has no artificial flavouring.

The next market for M&S to move into is household-cleaning products - at the moment, the eco-friendly washing powders on offer are generally limited to one brand, Ecover.

I applaud M&S's stance, but it will be interesting to see if the chain can balance its need for profits with its environmental credentials. First, M&S should stop dishing out free carrier bags. Second, it should post a target by which it will reduce packaging. M&S tends to over-package all of itsproduce. This is at odds with the company's "ethical" code.

* Having just returned from a holiday driving through Spain to the mountains north of Seville and back, via the Aveyron Gorge in south-western France, I've renamed my partner "slack-nav".

Is there anything more irritating than a man with a map of Europe on his lap, who can't find his reading glasses as you are negotiating Toulouse's inner ring road? Even the irritating disembodied female SatNav voice would be preferable to the screaming matches that ensued as we headed for Paris instead of our destination. And what about someone who says the next turn off is "coming up soon - it's probably the width of my thumbnail on the page"? At least in future I can blame the machine rather than the person I have to live with.