Vorderman’s mis-timed Farmfoods ad: a new low in celebrity endorsement

What the hell was Carol Vorderman doing advertising Bernard Matthews Chicken Drummers - six for a quid at Farmfoods - during the ad break for Hugh’s Chicken Run tonight?

This was a programme exploring the issue of chicken production that illustrated the conditions in which standard supermarket chickens are reared - shit-and-piss-covered, fat, immobile and devoid of light or outside space. Someone at Farmfoods obviously thought it would be a good idea to get Vorderman to promote bargain basement chicken during the final ad break in tonight’s concluding episode. Thus Farmfoods’ ad buyers and Vorderman herself prove themselves to be fans of sicko humour. Or total morons. Possibly both.

There surely can be little public affection remaining for the unscrupulous Ms Vorderman - this spectacularly insincere Farmfoods stuff merely adds to the furore over her problematic involvement with loan company FirstPlus.

(And Farmfoods - what the hell is that name about? This is a shop that sells frozen pizzas, chips and kebabs to students and fat people. They’d probably sell battered dog turds if they thought people would buy ‘em. So why Farmfoods? It’s totally incongruous. It’s like launching a new 4×4 called a “BMW Trees”.)

Aside from the adverts, the programme itself was actually pretty good. If you ignore the fact that the sort of people tuning in to watch Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall on Channel 4 are significantly less likely than the public at large to require conversion to the free range cause, it was a surprisngly worthwhile bit of telly. HFW’s decision to set up his own intensive chicken production facility at first seemed counter-intuitive - bordering on the criminal - but ultimately was the only way the cameras were going to be able to secure reliable access to the kind of facility where almost all shop-bought chickens are typically farmed.

The moment when the first of his free range birds muddled its way out of the chicken shed and into the daylight was also a very early contender for TV moment of the year.

What struck me about the programme as a whole was the fact that from producer to the point of sale, the entire poultry industry is shrouded in secrecy. Fearnley-Whittingstall couldn’t get access to an intensive chicken farm, he struggled to get a stockman willing to help him and three of the UK’s four largest supermarkets - Tesco, Asda and Morrisons - declined to even engage with the issue. (Tesco, in particular, showed their true awfulness, offering up the “deputy manager” - not even the manager! - of a single store in Axminster for sacrifice but reneging embarrassingly on the initial offer of a proper interview.)

This level of secrecy is carefully protected for very good reasons. It keeps consumers in the dark, meaning that they don’t ask questions about how birds are farmed before shovelling them down their gobs. Consequently, they keep on buying cheap, factory-farmed chickens at two for five quid. In turn, this consumer behaviour allows the supermarkets to claim there is no demand for free range chicken and that they are simply giving customers what they want. It’s a classic Catch-22 that enables the supermarkets to continue selling 40-day old, fatty, hock-burned chickens at a massive profit - while using us consumers to excuse their objectionable practices.

(Of course, some people, even once they know where their cheap chicken comes from, are happy with their choice because they prefer to pay less for their food - and that’s up to them. The central problem is that hardly anyone does know.)

Whether HFW has raised general levels of awareness is open to question. If Hugh’s Chicken Run was on ITV straight after Corry he might be in with a chance of success. But of course it wasn’t. It may have helped foster an inclination towards free range chickens among a small percentage of bearded, sandal-wearing middle-class waverers (like me) but after the guilt wears off, the majority of people seem happy with two for a fiver.

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