TV review: The Hairy Bikers: Mums Know Best, BBC2 (From Blackpool Citizen)

TV review: The Hairy Bikers: Mums Know Best, BBC2

3:57pm Thursday 21st January 2010

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ARE Dave Myers and Si King the luckiest people on television?

Imagine the scenario — you’re a self-confessed fat bloke, cruising through life, eating a lot and riding your bike, while checking your beard growth on a weekly basis and having a crack at the occasional bit of cooking. Then suddenly, there’s TV shows, DVDs, books — in fact, you’ve created your very own money machine.

Obviously it didn’t really happen like that. Dave, from Barrow-in-Furness, and Si, from Washington, Tyne and Wear, both have television backgrounds and the former is, bizarrely enough, a trained make-up artist.

The general idea of this latest series is that the hirsute pair travel up and down the country, meeting people — mostly women — who have carried on using traditional recipes handed down through the generations.

What they then do is invite a number to a recipe fair, get them to cook up their food of choice and have the general public in to try the results. I would imagine the next move is to collect them all together in an expensive hardback recipe book.

To be fair, it’s not a bad idea, and, as well as featuring good old-fashioned favourites, there’s modern twists with bhajis and pakoras lining up alongside shortbreads and fruit cakes.

It makes for semi-interesting television and does push home the message that a return to proper family cooking would not be a bad idea. Sadly, most of us work full-time these days and don’t necessarily have the free time to spend our days making fondant fancies, pastries and baking cakes. It’s as much as we can do to get ourselves down to the shop to buy them.

In a way, it kind of brings Jamie Oliver’s school meals campaign into the home, though with slightly less reliance on the healthy side of food — looking at them, I’m not sure Dave and Si are too concerned with salt and calorie content.

The two are good presenters and, though primarily concerned with making cooking look fun while having a laugh themselves (like Vic and Bob in the kitchen), at least put themselves on the frontline by giving live demonstrations at their recipe festivals.

All in, they’re funnier than Delia, less knowingly camera caressing than Nigella and not as annoying as Jamie (they would never say “pukka”), which, if there has to be cooking programmes on TV, is no bad thing. They need to be careful on those bikes, though. At one point, somewhere near Barrow, both of them drove straight across a junction without appearing to slow down. Tut tut!

As an afterthought though, the concept that “mums know best” isn’t always true. My mum still makes great pastry, but I’ve never got over the shepherd’s pie she used to force me to eat as a kid, especially when I just wanted chips every day. Sorry mum, I didn’t have the heart to tell you before, but it had to come out sometime . . .

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