Mediaguardian asks whether we watched Dumped or Hell’s Kitchen (now with Marco Pierre White).
Obviously, I watched neither. I can report that the trailer for Hell’s Kitchen seems to be exactly the same as The Restaurant over on BBC2 – both showing people slinging food around the place (the BBC has already had to respond to complaints that its food-fight trail was a gross waste of food). Indeed the series are largely the same except that the BBC show has Raymond Blanc and isn’t using celebrities.
Instead, can I recommend last night’s Panorama which featured a school-masterly Vivian White wandering around Swindon brow-beating slacker youngsters into getting off their backsides and actually going out and finding a job. It was hilarious.
Swindon, you see, isn’t a bad place to find a job. It’s just that these kids preferred to sit at home on their Playstations and picking up a £45 job-seeker’s allowance instead of finding something better to do. At least a couple of them actually managed to end up with proper jobs by the end of it. The sight of Vivian White turning up at their homes at 5.30am to make sure that they set off for their early shift at the Honda plant must have put the fear of god into them. And they thought they’d left school!
Just returning to Dumped for a moment. First of all, have a read of this, and in particular the comments – she gets lascerated.
“Then it escalated into collecting empty water bottles out of the edit suites we were cutting the series in so I could take them back to the office to recycle.”
Maybe you could try drinking filtered water or *shock horror*, tap water from a glass and then you’ll eliminate the plastic bottles totally…or is that too obvious?
I’m truly astounded that it took the involvement on this programme before you realised that rubbish actually “went somewhere”. What did you think happened, that it vanished into thin air like magic?
And finally, have a look at the following poster from a bus-stop in Tottenham Court Road:

A clever poster this, surely? Lots of crushed cans advertising Dumped.
But click on the photo above and have a look at the fullsize version of the image. There are a suspiciously large number of Pepsi Max cans marked 45p.
Surely they used waste cans for the ad didn’t they? I mean they wouldn’t have gone out and bought some crates of cans, poured away the contents and then crushed the cans just to illustrate conspicuous waste? I mean, that’d be terribly wasteful wouldn’t it?