First off, a disclaimer: I already pay tribute to the ‘local/sustainable/quality ingredients’ gods, so in a way this pilot episode feels like it’s preaching to the converted. However, where else on television can you get Michel Roux Jr and the Hairy Bikers on the same bill?

The premise of the programme is simple: each celeb foodie adopts a neglected British food and ‘campaigns’ to revive it in our hearts and homes, while rustling up some tasty grub with said ingredient to show us all how easy it is. The format reminds me of Hugh’s Fish Fight on Channel 4 earlier this year – is 2011 the year to campaign for your food (a step up from pedestrian food snobbery)?

It’s hard not to like Michel Roux Jr – he’s got French pedigree, he sounds English, he walks about Oxfordshire wheat fields in a smart blazer, and he comes across as someone passionate and relatable when he talks about food. I like the cut of his jib. The best part of his segment on Real Bread is when he visits a bakery under a Hackney railway bridge that uses a 200-year-old starter from Lapland. The finished loaves ‘turn him on’, and you can see why. Mmm.

His three recipes ranged from a simple white loaf (dead easy, but it’ll be a distant future where I dedicate an entire day waiting for dough to rise), a duck pie with bread crust (with a shocking amount of duck fat oozing absolutely everywhere) and a diplomat pudding – that’s posh French bread ‘n’ butter pud in wee little ramekins to you and me. Not exactly recipes I’ll be attempting in my wardrobe-sized kitchen. Lovely to watch and fantasise about.

In contrast to Roux’s savoire faire, you get the bumbling Hairy Bikers duo (it’s the Geordie one and the other one, sorry don’t know their names) espousing all things Brassica. Snowball, purple ones, ‘cheddar-cheese flavoured ones’ (they’re just orange) and my personal favourite, the Romanesco – which looks more like it could be the top of La Sagrada Familia’s towers than in your veg patch. What am I talking about? It’s the cauliflower, of course! Much maligned cousin of the trendy broccoli.

The Bikers’ food style is hearty to say the least, but their three recipes are meant to lure the British family back to buying caulis – cauliflower cheese with mushrooms and bacon, a ‘posh’ cauliflower purée with seared scallops, and an aloo bhaji curry. All ticking the ‘family favourites’ boxes. Guest chef Yotam Ottolenghi (he does sexy, sexy things to vegetables in a modern Middle Eastern style… check out his New Vegetarian column in the Guardian) is invited to do a crowd taste test, and he whips up a grilled cauliflower salad that looks easy, and yet it would never have occurred to me to try it. I would love to see Ottolenghi do a vegetarian food show.

But I digress. Overall the first episode is fun, informative and hasn’t stuck too stringently to a format that stifles each guest’s personalities. By concentrating on a key ingredient it’ll make the aspiring chef at home think differently about the same old veg, or maybe take a little time to try their hand at making bread. Will the campaign work? Well I’ve got a sourdough starter growing in my kitchen, and there’s a snowball in the fridge awaiting its transformation. But then again, I was at the altar from the start.

UPDATE: The Great British Food Revival is airing weekly at 8 p.m. from Wednesday 9 March, on BBC Two.

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