The Times reviews C4's 'Jamie saves our bacon' shown last night.

Jamie Saves Our Bacon was another fantastic programme in Channel 4’s food season and one that really shouldn’t have worked: it must have been a lively meeting that conceived a show which switched from the disgusting conditions pigs are kept in to how to cook a shoulder of pork; that zipped from tail docking (triple ouch) to a supermarket test that showed just how misleadingly products are labelled.

Oliver is passionate about food. He cares about it and somehow he gets you to care about it, because his point is simple: food is to be enjoyed so it should be produced and cooked to the highest standards. Blowsily, with too many lights flashing and noise blaring (did the pigs mind all that fuss?), we followed a pig from birth to plate. The setting was a TV studio that saw piglets being born, government ministers being interrogated and a test in which volunteers had to exist in a cage like pigs in Europe are forced to (although the humans had curtains, so they could have some privacy when they went for a wee).

The Times 30/1/09