Last night's TV. Review: Tried and Tasted: the Ultimate Shopping List (Channel 4), The Chillenden Murders (BBC2)

Have we reached ‘peak foodie’ now?

Too many cooks...?: From left, Stacie Stuart, Fred Sirieix, Michel Roux, Lucy Alexander and Jay Rayner on ‘Tried and Tasted’ duty

“The quality of our food has transformed in a generation,” the voiceover at the start of Tried and Tasted: The Ultimate Shopping List declared. Indisputable, that, and I write as one who can recall Marks and Spencer boil-in-the-bag spaghetti bolognese (the height of sophistication in 1977). Yet I wonder if it can be said that the quality of our TV programmes about food have transformed for the better in that same generation.

No matter how much goodwill I tried to muster towards the makers and presenters, I couldn’t help but taste strong undertones of desperation when I bit into this supposedly new format from Channel 4. Demonstrably, TV execs have to try new recipes for such shows: it is no longer sufficient to chuck a celeb chef and a hob into a studio and hope for the best. Plus I’m not sure if we’ve not reached “peak foodie”.

Maybe for that reason Tried and Tasted focuses on the kind of “convenience”, shop-bought food – product is the better word – that many of us rely on for refuelling, and here we find it sampled and analysed by the expert palates of Michel Roux Jr, Stacey Stewart, Lucy Alexander and Fred Sireix (him off First Dates). So this was a sort of gigantic disturbed dinner party comprising pre-cooked apple pie, lamb shank, baked beans and, er, whisky. It’s all a bit like an elongated televised version of those newspaper taste tests you get at Christmas when they find out that, say, the pricey Fortnum and Mason pud is too dry and overly sweet, but the Lidl one is the best that the interns over on the features desk have ever encountered. True to form, then, the Marks and Spencer “posh-looking” apple pie could only manage joint first place with the Aunt Bessie’s version (the latter at half the cost), while the Sainsbury’s pie had to share soggy bottom ranking with the effort from Morrisons. The ignominy!

As a modest antidote to the fussiness and pretensions of our modern foodie culture Tried and Tasted is to be applauded for its real-world approach. However, you can see the problem with this format, which is that none of us, I think I can safely say, would be prepared to traipse across town to secure an Aunt Bessie’s apple pie just because some smart folk on the television recommend it – the point of convenience foods being that they are convenient and don’t require much thought or effort to obtain or prepare. For some of us a nice bowl of Alphabetti Spaghetti in front of a re-run of Bullseye on Dave is all we need to feel happy with life, and we don’t need our choice validated by Channel 4. Now, where did I leave that tin opener?

Like the best crime mysteries, the makers of The Chillenden Murders left the most shocking revelations until last. A crime that shocked the nation, some 20 years ago in a field near the village of Chillenden in Kent, Lin Russell and her daughter Megan were murdered; the other daughter, nine year-old Josie, surviving the unprovoked attack. A drug addict, Michael Stone, was convicted of the killings (twice including after a re-trial some years later) and is 20 years into a 25-year term. He protests his innocence, and is thus ineligible for parole.

It is true that some people have doubts about his guilt, and there are corresponding suggestions that Lee Bellfield, who is serving time for the murder of Millie Dower, another crime that commanded national attention, might have been responsible (which he vehemently denies, as he does the murder of Millie Dowler). The BBC assembled a panel of lawyers, criminologists and scientists to sift and sift again the Chillenden evidence, but, as we found at the end of this second and final instalment of the investigation, one key exhibit is now missing. A shoelace found at the scene has now been lost, somewhere between the Forensic Science Service and the Kent Police. That is a substantial problem, as it contained DNA evidence that might have indicated who was present at the scene. Yet it may not have been capable of proving guilt or innocence beyond reasonable doubt. We all know there are miscarriages of justice, and always will be – but we should also remember that some famously celebrated cases of “miscarriage” eventually turned out to be anything but. We’re no nearer the truth about who killed Lin and Megan Russell, let alone why.