Last of the Fat Cows

Sugar Free Farm finished it’s run with the minor celebrities returning to the ‘real’ world of temptation and free booze and leaving behind the cossetted existence of getting up at 6 am to either clean pig sty’s or prepare beans on toast from raw natural ingredients. It’s a close call as to which of these tasks is the easiest or least preferable. Sugar-free and natural baked beans takes about three-and-a-half hours and involves the about 700 different ingredients meticulously combined together to taste nothing like the Heinz variety. Cleaning the pig-pen takes Stavros and Stavros Jnr about half an hour with a pressure washer. Anne, the lovely Anne, cut through the sycophantic drooling over the baked beans and simply declared that she found the ’57 variety’ much nicer. This after big Stav had just informed us that there are about 5 teaspoons of sugar in every can. Like the rest of us, Ms Widdecombe fails to see the downside of this statistic.

Anne is the real reason to watch this nonsense. She stands, with her posture like a dead tree, squinting into the sunshine and declares most of the helpful advice ‘mumbo-jumbo’ whilst pledging to get straight back on to the chocolate biscuits and refined sugar the moment she leaves the farm. I’m surprised the producers don’t ask her to return her fee, which was, I suspect, not inconsiderable but, actually, without her, the program would have been extremely dull. She sat giggling and steadfastly refused to participate as an ‘awareness expert’ (how do these people exist?) sat cross-legged and  instructed the group on how to appreciate a tomato before eating it. Whilst Alison and Gemma stood before a combined 2-and-a-bit stones of lard, representing their weight loss over the past fortnight, Anne appeared proudly before a plinth displaying exactly zero fat. She had neither lost nor gained, she felt neither better nor worse, she is coming up to 70 years old and doesn’t feel the need to prolong her life any further than it is likely to run. My guess is that this will be quite long enough, thank you, when the great redeemer calls her and she will go on to where ever we go with exactly the same uncompromising attitude that has carried her through this place and, presumably, there will be sugar for all of us. In a catch-up style epilogue to the program she revealed that her first act was to go on a cruise and smacked her jowly lips to indicate that sugar free was the last thing she had been.

The rest of the guys, however, had taken a modicum of wisdom from their journey. Yes, it has to be called a journey otherwise there is no program. You could truly believe that Alison had found a new way of life as she declared herself as sugar-free as it is possible to become in our culture. She seemed to be the only one who had the time to boil her beans for a day and a half or spend forever preparing a healthy substitute for KFC. The real achievement, for me, was to have lost a stone in weight in two weeks, profess to have continued the regime three months later and still appear to cast a shadow over the sun by simply getting out of bed.

Stavros snr, had been given the life-changing news that the size of his trade mark belly was caused, not by a sort of harmless internal bubble-wrap but by real, human fat caused by eating too much crap. ‘Don’t tell me that.’ he gasped, tearfully staring at the MRI scan he had just been gifted by the FFF team, hoping somehow that the Doctor may have revealed that 3 stone of clogging lard around your vital organs was exactly the sort of thing you needed to protect your delicate heart and lungs from disease. Big Stav had gone through his epiphany and was, also, a changed man. He was seen preparing some healthy snacks for a long car journey with his co-star son which would, hopefully, keep them out of The Little Chef for a few miles. It’s a shame that he bases his act on being overweight, the sight of a reasonably trim-looking 50 year-old doing strange dance steps is not really worth paying money for when you can simply attend a couple of wedding a year and stand by the dance floor just before last orders.

Someone else who makes a living from being obese is Gemma Collins. She would never admit this, of course, as she is under the impression that her role in whatever reality show she is appearing on is the one of ‘Young beauty who is having some diet issues’. No it’s not, Gemma, it’s ‘Weak willed twentysomething, with too much time and money on her hands’, and she plays it well. The noticeable thing about the program was its reluctance to reveal exactly how much alcohol was being consumed by the celebs. Gemma looked suspiciously chubby in the catch-up, yet she sat dutifully grilling herself a salmon and broccoli dinner whilst extolling the virtues of a healthy breakfast and plenny of froot. A glance at her ‘empties’ may have told us more but we were left to believe that the girl who had revealed to us last week that she would now embrace veganism as a way of life, but who this week devoured rabbit stew, had changed her eating, and drinking, habits forever. Only Peter, who stood self-consciously in front of his fridge, dared hint that sugar-free was a little more difficult than simply eating plenty of salted porridge. And over there is…mainly water *slams door shut*