Animal Farm

Monday 19th March,
9:00pm - 10:00pm Channel 4
1.4 million, 5.7% Audience Share

RadioTimes: 1/3Getting a restaurant critic and an evolutionary biologist to debate the merits of so-called "Frankenstein foods" is a neat idea. Roaming around a pretend farm full of freak animals is a slightly daft way to go about it, but there's still plenty of food for thought here as Giles Coren and Dr Olivia Judson explore the rights and wrongs of fluorescent rabbits, giant super-salmon and featherless chickens. Throughout the programme, Coren does a remarkable impression of a soft-headed simpleton, grumbling that messing with genes just seems "unnatural", even though Judson points out that all our fruit is cloned (ie grafted) and our vegetables are nothing like their natural ancestors. (I never knew, for example, that carrots are only orange because the Dutch bred them that way in the 17th century.) And the bit about a banned GM "golden rice" strain developed to tackle vitamin A deficiency, a disease that kills 250 people every hour according to an interviewee here, may make your blood boil. RT reviewer - David Butcher