If the apple rarely falls far from the tree, what bizarre and contrary seeds the Doherty brothers grew from. Pete chose heroin, fleeting rock stardom and hanging off the bony arm of a Croydon-born supermodel.
Jimmy chose something else. He chose life. He chose pigs. He chose rambling documentaries about making your own cornflakes in a rickety tumble-dryer (no laser beams needed).
Jimmy's Food Factory (BBC One, Wednesday) asked what 'really' goes into supermarket grub. While 30 minutes reading the ingredients of Jimmy's weekly shop might not make for scintillating TV, neither did this - not if you were expecting a hard-hitting exposé of grocery's sinister secrets.
Outlining his mission "to find out what they are doing to our food", Jimmy put huge metaphorical quotes around 'they' hinting at a vast conspiracy to infect our lard patties with alien genes.
It's rather simpler. We eat cereal because it exists; its makers want our cash. As conspiracies go, it's hardly JFK grassy-knoll territory. It's not even up there with the widely held theory that Jamie Oliver was beheaded in a freak carrot-peeling incident in 2002 and replaced by a shaved orang-utan.
Jimmy sensationally revealed that people want stuff that's simple for breakfast, and he's right - strangling a goose every morning is so 2007. Yet the facts that cornflakes are made from corn and you get cows' milk by milking cows were conveyed with such wide-eyed wonder that the show felt like a tortuously drawn-out Blue Peter segment. Robot milk! You could almost see his mind blow.
Though hugely likeable and photogenic enough as middle-class semi-rough, Jimmy is not a classic TV crusader. It's like getting the Fast Show chap who found everything "Brilliant!" to host Question Time.
And for all this talk of provenance, we don't really want to know how most food is made, just as we couldn't give a monkey's if there's a midget inside each ATM counting out the banknotes.
Another reading of the show would be that Jimmy is in cahoots with the evil supermarkets to convince a naïve public that over-priced, over-processed garbage is the best thing since well, sliced bread. Now there's a conspiracy for you.
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Jimmy chose something else. He chose life. He chose pigs. He chose rambling documentaries about making your own cornflakes in a rickety tumble-dryer (no laser beams needed).
Jimmy's Food Factory (BBC One, Wednesday) asked what 'really' goes into supermarket grub. While 30 minutes reading the ingredients of Jimmy's weekly shop might not make for scintillating TV, neither did this - not if you were expecting a hard-hitting exposé of grocery's sinister secrets.
Outlining his mission "to find out what they are doing to our food", Jimmy put huge metaphorical quotes around 'they' hinting at a vast conspiracy to infect our lard patties with alien genes.
It's rather simpler. We eat cereal because it exists; its makers want our cash. As conspiracies go, it's hardly JFK grassy-knoll territory. It's not even up there with the widely held theory that Jamie Oliver was beheaded in a freak carrot-peeling incident in 2002 and replaced by a shaved orang-utan.
Jimmy sensationally revealed that people want stuff that's simple for breakfast, and he's right - strangling a goose every morning is so 2007. Yet the facts that cornflakes are made from corn and you get cows' milk by milking cows were conveyed with such wide-eyed wonder that the show felt like a tortuously drawn-out Blue Peter segment. Robot milk! You could almost see his mind blow.
Though hugely likeable and photogenic enough as middle-class semi-rough, Jimmy is not a classic TV crusader. It's like getting the Fast Show chap who found everything "Brilliant!" to host Question Time.
And for all this talk of provenance, we don't really want to know how most food is made, just as we couldn't give a monkey's if there's a midget inside each ATM counting out the banknotes.
Another reading of the show would be that Jimmy is in cahoots with the evil supermarkets to convince a naïve public that over-priced, over-processed garbage is the best thing since well, sliced bread. Now there's a conspiracy for you.
More from this column
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