Rachel Khoo – Hannah Jane Thompson

Apparently, recent research has found that 1 in 4 British people (26%) now claim to spend more time watching TV through ‘on-demand’ services, such as BBC’s iPlayer, YouTube or Channel 4’s 4OD, than they do watching traditional ‘linear’ broadcast TV. Among young people ages 18 to 24, the figure jumps to a substantial 41%.

Frankly, though, as far as I can see, the only surprising thing here is that the figure isn’t higher.

I can safely say that I never, ever watch television when it’s actually on.

BBC iPlayer – ever-changing portal into all the latest TV

BBC iPlayer, and its (sadly inferior) cousins, are a permanent fixture on my computer, be it stored up in a list of tabs I’ve collected while browsing, saving them for later when I’ve got time to sit down and watch them properly, or actually playing – in the background as I potter around doing things, behind my Word document as I write, perched on my bed as I snuggle down for the evening, catching up on all the great programmes I’ve ‘missed’.

Except, I don’t actually consider myself to have ‘missed’ them – because that would suggest that I aimed to watch them live, when first broadcast, and failed.

I didn’t – on demand services have completely revolutionised the way that I – and people like me ‒ watch TV, to the point where I don’t even try to watch programmes live anymore.

Continue reading →

Upon arriving home from a month away, I come across a fabulous new BBC 2 food programme that reminds me of my love of France ‒ and which, unbelievably, proves that there is most definitely still room on TV for yet another cooking show

Rachel Khoo, my new TV food-crush (even if it is a month after everyone else)

I’ve been out of the country for the past month (briefly volunteering at small but interesting projects in Himachal Pradesh and Goa) and frankly, it makes me cringe to think that among some of the reasons I was apprehensive about going away for four weeks – including, for example, people realising they could do my job without me, what would happen to my waistline, whether I’d be able to carry everything I’d need for a month on my back ‒ was that I’d miss out on BBC iPlayer (I know, shoot me).

I hardly ever watch live TV, but I’ll regularly peruse the glorious iPlayer and open in endless tabs the frequently interesting, entertaining and fabulously on-demand programmes I find that I haven’t yet had a chance to watch.

Doing just that upon my return home, I discovered a new programme I hadn’t heard of before – BBC 2’s ‘The Little Paris Kitchen: Cooking with Rachel Khoo’. As in love with cooking programmes as I am (my watching of Saturday Kitchen of a morning is akin to a religious ritual, and I will be hoofed out of bed only for the most paramount of familial or national occasions, sighing with a resigned acceptance that I’ll just have to catch James Martin’s yummy offerings later on) I was sceptical of this one, fronted as it was on the BBC site by a young girl laughing into food mid-frame, eerily reminiscent of those hilarious but depressing ‘Women Laughing Alone With Salad/Fruit’ stock photos that regularly do the Internet rounds. Sigh.

Also, another programme on luxurious, indulgent but oh-so-easy cooking presented by a young, pretty woman? If Nigella hadn’t already cornered that market a while back (albeit, slightly more saucily than entirely necessary), who could forget Sophie Dahl’s well-meaning and sweet but essentially lacklustre attempts at comfort food, or Lorraine Pascale’s enjoyable but nonetheless slightly sickening missives of trying to convince all us mortals that she does really eat loads of cake and cheese and bread, honest (hey, maybe she genuinely does, in which case, I’m still annoyed!)*? Could this new programme really be offering anything different?

Well, it turns out, yes.

Continue reading →