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.

Do you love old kitchy adverts?

Do you reject bigotry but also find it fascinating?

Do you appreciate profound aphorisms about marketing?

Then MAD MEN ™ is for You

People back then were so different from us, yet in many ways the same.

Seriously, this must be the most boring thing to ever be on television. Every episode is the same. They smoke and drink at work, someone is sexist, then Don Draper is ineffable and has an affair. Big whoop.

A quick plug. Over at SF “Let’s Talk Sci-fi” X, I’ve been reviewing Stacey Abbott’s not-very-good The Cult TV Book. My other contributions to this hallowed organ of science fiction, however, are reserved for the print edition – the next issue of which is guest edited by one Terry Pratchett.

Japanese animation seems to happen on another planet. Apart from lauded breakthrough films like Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away and Satashi Kon’s Millennium Actress, we hear very little of it. The TV side especially maintains a reputation for being trashy, childish and cheap. No bullshit: a lot of TV anime is trashy, childish and cheap, but so is a lot of TV. And on Japanese TV, animation is not a side dish, but a main course. Popular anime shows get prime time slots, long runs of several series, follow-up films and big marketing budgets.

Someone interested in film – or visual entertainment in general – could do worse than keep an eye on this scene. For all the kiddy cash-ins, Japan has exerted a massive influence on animation worldwide. Its animators cultivated uniquely economical ways of describing motion and feeling, born of necessity when the process was painstaking and budgets were low. On this stylistic foundation was built an edifice of sophisticated and mature classics. Ghost in the Shell reinvigorated cyberpunk; Neon Genesis Evangelion used sci-fi tropes to create gut-wrenching Freudian melodrama; Miyazaki won the West over with deft storytelling and unparalleled craft.

Computers gave talented artists and directors a vast array of novel techniques to use and abuse, and offer lowered costs and raised production values across the board. As a result, TV anime through the ’00s increased in quality and quantity, with a constant scramble for new fads and angles, the output often formulaic but occasionally brilliant. Today, anime is slick, popular, confident and keen to try new things. And in Japan, it has a broader demographic appeal than you might expect. Shows for male viewers dominate, roughly split into young adult (shonen) and grown-up (seinen) programming. But there’s a good line in quirky romances for the young female audience (shoujo), and again for their grown up counterparts (josei). In this latter category we find Eden of the East, a smart, unusual thriller. It is definitely a contemporary show: it finished its initial run in June last year, and has a feet-on-the-ground modern day setting. Two movie sequels, one released and one still in development, are showing in Japan only. For this review we’re just looking at the series, which is to be distributed in the US by Funimation.

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