Television Review

DISHES (C4), you feel, was bound to happen sooner or later, and it's probably as well to get it over with. But did it have to be quite this painful? Basically, Dishes is Blind Date plus Ready Steady Cook - you choose your date on the basis of their cuisine. The idea is fairly putrid, and it doesn't help that the chef has tried to hide the fact by smothering it with the sauce of irony.

Dishes is one of the new breed of television programmes in which the presenters - Kate Thornton and Danny Brown - seem to have wandered in off the street, while the guests have apparently spent the last six months rehearsing their acts. When the meals are finally served, each cook has to offer a kind of mission statement. Miss Pork Chop said she had cooked her chop with a sauce, "'cause I can be as saucy as anything he likes on a date". Miss Cheese Fondue, speaking French, the language of romance and menus, offered the hope that this would prove a recipe for love, only to have it dismissed as "posh cheese on toast". Miss Raspberry Cream, who was Italian, said: "As you bite my dish and taste its sweetness, I will bite your soul and taste its passion."

In fact, before they cooked anything, Ollie had identified Miss Pork Chop - the audience's clear favourite - as his ideal date but, not knowing who was going to cook what, had expressed a firm distaste for pork. So a tension had been set up: loves the girl, hates the chop. Can she cook it well enough to overcome his anti-pork prejudice? Or will he lose his dream girl to the cheap temptations of a raspberry cream sundae? This might have added to the fun if it hadn't been so obviously a boil-in-the-bag, pre-cooked device. As it was, the whole thing left a rather sickly taste behind.

Meanwhile, the national obsession with cookery programmes marches on. According to the first in a Horizon trilogy, Fat Files (BBC2), we are now not far below the United States in the world obesity league tables. You might imagine that there is some connection between the two facts. But many overweight people deny a link between their size and their diet: they are, as the programme's title put it, "Born to Be Fat".

In search of really grotesque obesity, the programme travelled to the US, where fat activists assemble to shout affirmative slogans such as "We're here, we're spheres, we're fat, that's that". "There are 96 million fat people just like us," an anti-sizeist leader shouted, and everybody cheered, as if 96 million people suffering a higher risk of heart disease, cancer and diabetes was a real achievement.

Here we met an aquatic dance troupe called the Padded Lilies, a pun that lumbers almost as much as their act. All these women had been through terrible dieting experiences - one woman told how her entire family had been put on amphetamines to help them lose weight, which she said led to "an interesting family dynamic". All of them were still very, very fat, and thought it had to be due to slow metabolisms - it wasn't that they ate a lot, just that they didn't burn it up the way thin people do.

This turned out to be self-delusion: overweight people almost always burn up calories far faster than anybody else, if only because they are toting around so much weight. But there was support for the idea that weight is genetically determined, in the shape of Sharon and Debbie, identical twins separated at birth. Sharon was brought up a Southern Catholic, on a diet of pork sausages and no exercise; Debbie was brought up Jewish, fish-eating and gym-crazy; at the age of 46, the two of them weigh almost exactly the same.

Now scientists have discovered a hormone, leptin, which switches off the appetite: if you don't have enough leptin or, more likely, its signal is somehow suppressed, you just don't know when to stop eating. The Padded Lilies were unsure how to take this; some of them felt it let them off the hook, others felt that being regarded as defective wasn't necessarily an improvement on being regarded as weak-willed and greedy. This seemed to hit the nail on the head. TV science is starting to be obsessed with the kind of Darwinian thinking that seems to say, heck, it ain't my fault I'm the way I am, it's just the way I evolved. The thought might look appetising, but too much of it leaves your brain awfully flabby.