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    The Supersizers are back...

    Huzzah!

    They did the 1980s this week. It was interesting to see how the food of not all that long ago has, in a large part, shaped our eating habits now - what with the introduction of the microwave and all the horrors it inflicted in the name of convenience - ready meals (as Giles Coren pointed out, it took six minutes to cook the thing, you could cook a decent meal in that time), going to restaurants becoming a normal thing for many people rather than a special treat, the emergence of "foreign" food like sun dried tomatoes.

    I also swear the meal at the end of each episode is simply an excuse for Sue Perkins to get absolutely smashed out of her box, which she does with aplomb. The lunch with Tebbitt and Archer was amusing, and as for the 1980s cocktail bit...urgh!

    Middle ages next week. Personally, I can't wait, it's a great show

    #2
    The Supersizers are back...

    It's helped by the fact that they are prepared to eat pretty much anything that is put in front of them, with an open mind, whether it's sheeps head, cock's comb or feet, or most remarkably, pop-tarts. The drinking is most probably a resut of the desire to remove the taste of some of these dishes.
    I've just seen them interviewed on the One Show and they were asked how people of the past would perceive our own current menu. They said that the thing that would most astonish them is the fact that we phone up for somebody to deliver a huge wheel of cheese on a motorbike because we're too damn lazy to fetch it themselves.

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      #3
      The Supersizers are back...

      The main thing I took from the programme is that the first mobile phones in 1985 cost £3000. Which is, what, over 10 grand today? If I had been an 80's yuppie I wouldn't have dared walk the streets bellowing into one!

      It was very London-centric though; like the idea that eating ciabatta was an 80's thing? Not round here, it wasn't.

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        #4
        The Supersizers are back...

        What's ciabatta?

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          #5
          The Supersizers are back...

          A kind of Italian-y bread.

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            #6
            The Supersizers are back...

            London people still seem to eat quite a bit of ciabatta these days, in my experience.

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              #7
              The Supersizers are back...

              I don't think ciabatta had even made it out to the London suburbs back then. Olives out of a tin was the height of sophistication for us in those days.

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                #8
                The Supersizers are back...

                Why on Earth... wrote:
                A kind of Italian-y bread.
                You didn't really have to explain that. I just posed the question for comedic effect. I'm just telling you this so I don't look so dumb as to not know what it is.

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                  #9
                  The Supersizers are back...

                  I've quite enjoyed some of the other episodes of this, but come on, the '80s one was terrible. Were we seriously meant to buy Sue Perkins and the posh one being so confused about the concept of ready meals and acting as though they were some weird throwback that don't exist anymore? Well I guess he probably dines out every single evening, but most people aren't like that. Surely their sales have sky-rocketed since the '80s.

                  It was too much of them sneering at food that's still available, and that was only highlighted by them eating things in their current packaging that they'd just bought from the local Sainsburys. They could have at least gone on about how things like Pot Noodles (while disgusting) are actually far less bad for you now because they've drastically reduced the salt content. So they weren't really having a proper '80s diet at all. It was crap!

                  Next week does look good though.

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                    #10
                    The Supersizers are back...

                    imitationleather wrote:

                    Well I guess he probably dines out every single evening, but most people aren't like that. Surely their sales have sky-rocketed since the '80s.

                    So they weren't really having a proper '80s diet at all. It was crap!
                    Those were my thoughts. Those of us who grew up on the council estates had very little of what was on offer on tonight's repeated program.

                    I wonder what percentage of the population actually had dinner parties like the one in question?

                    More legislated nostalgia from the BBC, trying to force us to possess a body of memories that few of us actually had. It was a nice window on how the other one percent lived though.

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                      #11
                      The Supersizers are back...

                      They've answered this "Why don't they show what the proles ate and how they lived?" question before, the answer was "Because it's more interesting to replicate and easier to poke fun at how the Great and The Good ate and acted." After all, no one wants to see them eating gruel and pottage in the Middle Ages and working all day in the field (if you do, there are other programmes that have done that), we want swans stuffed with peacock in aspic and jousting. Similarly, it makes better light entertainment (and that's what this is, not a heavy social commentary) to rip the piss out of yuppies and nouvelle cuisine rather than to stick them in a council flat with no money. After all, had they done that, I'm sure we'd have castigated them for callously attacking the casualties of Thatcherism.

                      It was too much of them sneering at food that's still available, and that was only highlighted by them eating things in their current packaging that they'd just bought from the local Sainsburys.
                      And rightly so, most ready meals are simply not to be countenanced.

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                        #12
                        The Supersizers are back...

                        Well, there was that bit where they dressed up as miners I suppose.

                        I watched the episode from series 1 about the '70s last night. It was far more entertaining, and they'd at least taken the Findus crispy pancakes out of their new packaging and placed them in to a reproduction from the era. Still not as good as the episodes where they eat sheep heads and things like that, though.

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                          #13
                          The Supersizers are back...

                          Was there anything particularly different in what the proles eat back in the 80's compared to now...?

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