In both shows, spoof interviewers put absurd questions to notable figures who believed they were taking part in serious documentary items.
GREAT HARVEST NEAR ME SERIES
Slightly different, in that viewers were in on the joke while the participants were the ones hoaxed, were British series such as Chris Morris's Brass Eye (1997-2001) and Sacha Baron Cohen's Da Ali G Show (2000-2004), both on Channel 4. Presenters don't ask challenging questions, and problematic details are skipped over quickly."
GREAT HARVEST NEAR ME TV
"As well as targeting the establishment, we're also making fun of the way that TV documentaries can be really superficial. I wanted to respect the style of a mainstream TV documentary, but never thought people would believe it for more than a few minutes. "Our intention wasn't to create a hoax – it was just that we felt the satire would be more powerful if it caught people by surprise. And their reaction proves our point: if people could believe it was real then it shows how bleak things really have become."īut Kingsley says the filmmakers didn't set out to hoodwink viewers.
We wanted to make the audience feel angry about how unfair our country has become, and how awful it is that we just accept this state of affairs." Nevertheless, a couple of members of Parliament condemned it and some who watched insisted that, even as satire, it had been – forgive the pun – in poor taste.įor all the outlandishness of the concept, however, the programme's director Tom Kingsley tells BBC Culture that the show had a very sober purpose – to "satirise the way that the misery of the cost of living has become normalised. It was a spoof inspired by Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal, the author's satirical 1729 essay suggesting that poor people in Ireland should sell their children as food to the rich, which was referenced at the end of the programme, both verbally by Wallace and in the credits. "It's all gravy, baby, because our babies taste great with gravy," chirped the voiceover on a promotional film.īy now, most viewers had realised. Then we learned that the company's new premium product would be meat created using "donations" from children. "You know there's something wrong when you've got to jump on a bus and go and have some flesh scooped out of your arm for money," she said. Wallace interviewed a 67-year-old woman driven by the cost of living crisis to, reluctantly, donate. The pair discussed the terroir aspect of the meat – does the stuff grown from donors in the North East of England taste different to that from donors in the South East?Īt this point, viewers were taking to social media to express their disgust but there was much worse to come. The enthusiastic Wallace enlisted chef Michel Roux Jr to sample some steaks with him.
Wallace was given a tour of the production plant where 30kg meat "cakes" were grown in nutrient-rich tanks from thin slices of human flesh provided by paid donors.
Good Harvest, we were told, is a company producing six tonnes of engineered human meat every day. – The documentary horror that still terrifies That’s right, a protein made from human cells". "This," he said, beaming and holding out a steak, "is engineered human meat. Wallace, a genial broadcaster best known for co-presenting the BBC's cooking reality show MasterChef, was fronting a half-hour Channel 4 programme about a new development in food technology. On Monday night in the UK, viewers settled in to watch a new documentary, Gregg Wallace: The British Miracle Meat, with mounting horror.
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