Giles Coren is described on the CH4 website as a "self-professed science sceptic", I reckon that means he is proud to be bad at maths.
His role is that of the GM critic. Throughout the program he comes out with tasty sentences like : "Frankenfood", "look at the arse on that, it's horrible", "but cloning is the really scary stuff isn't it?", "it tastes like horse, why would you bother". The selectively bred cow is "wrong" because he does not like its behind, and because he does not like the taste of its meat.
All good sound bites for an afternoon blah-programme, somewhere in the 500's of your channel guide, but unfortunate for a Channel 4 Science programme.
Latent in his chatter is a kind of noble savage of food production: a belief, that somewhere in the distant past, all food was "natural","healthy" and "tasty", (around the time when we all got along and lived in lovely thatched cottages). I suspect he would time the demise of this with the emergence of the scythe.
Mr Coren has no idea what he objects to. When Olivia Judd counters one of his "cloning-is-bad" tantrums by explaining that most apples are the product of grafting and thus clones, he points out that "people are not worried about apples though, are they?". This pretty much sums up the programme. He runs up and down the sidelines of the debate, scratches his head and wees on his shoes, without once managing to engage in a meaningful exchange.
Short of "I don't get it and I don't want to", he mustered no critical thought or argument. In the closing conversation he is confronted with the idea of growing meat from stemcells, his question is: "But what would it taste like, surely it's the interesting live of the animal that makes it tasty".
Is this a male Jade Goody with a private education? According to wikipedia he has a degree in English and writes on food, but now we know what he does not understand about science. An hour well spent!
We will struggle to have an informed debate on GM food if we refuse to engage beyond the arse-shape of certain animals.
I wonder what would happen if a "scientist" were to make uninformed comments about foppish sports jackets or the taste organic walnuts. Maybe this is a way to bring qualified comment back into the equation.
This is the Wife Swap style of documentary making, with no interest in exploring issues, but rather just an attempt to engineer conflict between protagonists. What is fine for fluff tv like WS is sadly unsuited for issues that actually matter. Unfortunately the show failed its lowly aims anyway, given that Coren was so monumentally uninformed that he wasn't actually able to sustain any form of discussion with the bizarre creation going by the name of Olivia Judson, let alone argue with her. This conflict-television approach seems to be infecting all of C4's science coverage. Last year's Richard Dawkins blames-everything-bad-in-the-world-on-religion programs suffered similarly. Instead of a reasoned analysis of the tensions (or not) between science and religion, all we get is frothing-at-the-mouth zealots hurling insults at each other. In fact the only shows which don't follow the conflict formula are the ones where C4 gives a soapbox to barefaced liars like Gillian McKeith and Martin Durkin. And to think that C4 is still publicly funded in return for socially responsible broadcasting. Its totally outrageous.
