Jamie Oliver's current series, in which attempts to teach Rotherham - and by extension the whole nation - how to cook, may be his best show yet. It's certainly his most socially ambitious. Although he's been derided for patronising the working classes (almost always by middle-class TV critics) I think his refusal to accept that a whole stratum of people should be eating appallingly badly when they can, at no extra cost, eat much better, is brilliant. He's astonished at the way some people eat. And astonishment - in our knowing, relativistic culture - is an increasingly rare commodity. I admire him for it, and for the determination and imagination with which he sets about attacking the problem he's identified.
The question I have is about whether he'll continue to to believe that Channel 4 is the right partner to work with. I have no idea what the terms of his deal are or have been, and C4 have obviously been enormously good to him over the years. But Oliver isn't satisfied with being a celebrity chef these days. He wants to change the world. Or at least the country. And the natural home for such social crusades is the BBC, for the simple reason that they reach a far bigger audience that C4. Not only would Oliver's TV ratings increase on BBC1, but the BBC can deploy its whole formidable arsenal of media outlets on his behalf. He is, after all, performing a public service now. I wonder if, come his next project, he'll be tempted to move to the home of public service broadcasting. It seems a natural fit.
