After the closure of 68-year-old American food magazine Gourmet, its editor-in-chief (a former New York Times restaurant critic) has reinvented herself as Ruth Reichl, television food adventurer (pictured, centre). While Food School (Nat Geo Adventure, Saturdays at 10pm) and Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations (reruns on Discovery Travel & Living, Wednesdays at 9pm) share a production house, as well as a focus on local eats, Reichl's style is hand-whipped fresh cream next to Bourdain's roasted boar.
The food-porn quality of Food School (known as Gourmet's Adventures with Ruth in the United States) is exemplified by Reichl's visit to Tennessee's Blackberry Farm with friend and actress Frances McDormand (Burn After Reading) in the first episode. Against a lush backdrop of verdant land and clear rivers at the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains, the two women pick snap peas (which one of the gardeners calls 'skittles for grown-ups'), unearth heirloom turnips, cook strawberry-elder flower jam and fly fish for rainbow trout. Reichl's slow alto voice velvet-wraps and caresses each ingredient as she prepares a six-course meal with the farm's proprietor.
The locavore love is so palpable in the shots of farm work and cooking that Reichl's urban-accented philosophical narrations of 'people who believe in being good stewards of the land' are superfluous. It's best to just imagine the sweet taste of snap-pea, walnut and cheese curd salad, and grilled trout fillet in a river-herb broth.
Speaking of adult filmmaking, the Sons of Anarchy (FX; Thursdays at 11pm) add pornography (which they see as a step up into legitimacy) to their family vice business in the second season. It's hard to believe this band of gun-smuggling bikers are seen by the good people of Charming as folk heroes who keep drugs, prostitution and greedy developers out, and the small-town spirit of freedom intact.
As the Hamlet-esque tension between head honchos Jax Teller (Charlie Hunnam; Queer as Folk) and his stepfather, Clay Morrow (Ron Perlman au naturale; Hellboy), starts to shake apart the gang, dead bodies pile up and we begin to wonder if Charming would be better off razed and turned into a strip mall after all.
THE BEEB IS SORRY: BBC Worldwide has apologised for having misled us, and therefore you, our readers, with regard to The Jonathan Ross Show, which we claimed last week would be 'dated'. The series currently being shown on Thursdays at 9.55pm is, the broadcaster now assures us, series 18, not series 16 (and because Post Magazine had to go to print before this could be checked, we cannot confirm whether the BBC has got it right this time). If series 18, which began airing in Britain in mid-January, is indeed being shown, we applaud BBC Entertainment for finally giving Hong Kong current programming - and ask that that may soon be the case with other shows.
