Keeping Britain Fed
Amazing Spaces
Rating: 
Malcolm would be regarded as a proper pest these days.
He was the drippy student, played by Nigel Plaskitt in a series of Seventies telly ads, who tried to plead he was too poorly to sit his exams.
His mum (Barbara New) was having none of it. ‘Course you can, Malcolm,’ she scolded, handing him a squeezy bottle of decongestant to squirt up his nose.
The catchphrase was as contagious as flu. Soon we were all saying it — the put-down for every feeble protest.
Didn’t feel able to wash the dishes or mow the lawn? Course you can, Malcolm.
No one spared a thought for Malcolm’s classmates or the poor soul who had to sit next to him on the bus.
The youth was a sniffly super-spreader exploding with viruses. Masking his symptoms with a nasal spray only made him more infectious.
Stay at home, Malcolm. No one else wants your rotten cold. And wash your hands.
One consequence of the coronavirus pandemic is that we’re all much more conscious about basic ways to control the spread of infections.
Our workplaces might actually be much healthier for it in the future.
Keeping Britain Fed, presented by Sara Cox (pictured) reveals what life is like for workers on the production line during the pandemic
At a sausage factory in Ireland, on the supermarket documentary Keeping Britain Fed (BBC2), workers on the production line have always worn hair nets and latex gloves — but now they have masks and visors too.
Perspex shields separate them into makeshift cubicles along the conveyor belt.
These are necessary precautions against Covid-19, but they’ve brought an unexpected bonus: sick leave is down by half.
Just 2 per cent of the workforce is absent, announced a cheerful manager, through his plastic double glazing.
We might find that many of our current health measures remain in place, simply because they are cost effective, long after the emergency is over.
Think you can’t keep wearing a face mask to the shops for ever? Course you can, Malcolm.
Let’s hope we’ve seen the last of panic buying, though.
A Tesco manager in Wembley, named Mahir, told presenter Sara Cox that he’d never experienced anything like the bedlam that kicked off lockdown.
The melee for the toilet rolls was the worst, Mahir said: ‘It was like a rugby game, people buying three, four and five packs.’
Behind-the-scenes supermarket shows are always heavy on statistics, but Sara had some genuinely impressive ones.
As the crisis struck, Britons made 42 million extra shopping trips. Chocolate and booze sales were up by nearly a third.
And as we all got baking, one flour producer took ten weeks’ worth of orders in a single day. That’s a lot of sourdough. These documentaries are usually TV filler, but Keeping Britain Fed really did offer food for thought about how our altered world is going to function.
If it functions half as well as engineer Guy’s disappearing bathroom on Amazing Spaces (C4), life will be marvellous.
Matey architect presenter George Clarke was blinking in disbelief at the sliding wall in a converted bakehouse in Wales.
Meanwhile, on Channel 4’s Amazing Spaces, presenter George Clarke was producing magic in Wales
Pulleys shifted, wheels turned and a tiled shower with toilet and basin twirled out of hidden compartments.
It was like watching the swivelling staircases in Harry Potter’s magical school, Hogwarts: you could see what was happening but not how it was done.
Guy and his wife Tracy also hid a fold-down dining table behind a picture on the wall.
Next to that, George’s other eccentricities — a Reliant Robin that doubled as a campervan, and a 3D model of an observatory carved from fruit — seemed quite commonplace.