
This ought to be the stupidest programme ever, and yet, and yet. One comedian (spindly Sue Perkins) and one journalist (Giles Coren, restaurant critic of the Times and one-time winner of the Bad Sex In Fiction award for a line in his 2005 novel about a penis which leapt around “like a shower dropped in an empty bath”) dress up in silly clothes and, for a week at a time, eat their way through a historical epoch. My favourite was the Supersizers Go… Regency. It featured bonnets, jugged hare and for Coren, eating the diet of the history’s greediest bastard, Prince Regent, later George IV, a breakfast of champagne and pigeon pie. Afterwards, he said he felt “like a python who has swallowed a shopping trolley.”