UR TV CAST

The result is 60 million Americans with a particularly nasty new kind of diabetes, at a time when HFCS contributes up to a fifth of the calories in the diets of American children. It’s in junk food and it’s in juice (or what passes for it in most chill-cabinets), and it’s in almost every conceivable food item in between.Critser’s prognosis is bleak: only the privileged have the strategies and wherewithal to avoid the hypoglycaemic hell that awaits the less franchised. Public health bodies, continually revising their estimates of how much exercise is healthful downward in the hope of getting anyone to do any at all, are powerless against the culture of consumption. As with smoking, the situation will be forced when the healthy refuse to pay inflated insurance premiums for the treatment of the unwell. Critser conscientiously demonstrates how class issues, combined with the imperatives of consumer capitalism, have created a huge new sector of suffering: his prescription is for us all to rediscover satiety, to remember how it feels to be full and not want more.But, even for the privileged, food has become a status symbol, a marker of aspirational savoir-faire; for the rest, as the band Fast Food Rockers demonstrates, food has become, like smoking, a way to defy the incessant aspirational urgings of consumer capitalism and relax in ones’ loserdom for a moment.

Only when the gap between who we are and who we’re urged to be begins to close will the tobacco company’s doctor find himself, one suspects, finally on the breadline.. The inhabitants of Alpha Centauri have access to something we don’t: the first series of The Avengers, in which Patrick Macnee was teamed with Ian Hendry, and not a pair of kinky boots in sight; the Quatermass story in which aliens spawn inside a cluster of gasometers; the production of Willis Hall’s Brass Band Comedies in which a greyhound piped a whorl of diarrhoea over the actor Geoffrey Bayldon. (An early Avengers episode, for instance, in which an actress declares that she was once a “sweetie’s forceheart”, and covers her fluff by adding “oh, it must be the gin”.) The rest were left to radiate through the ether. Lost to us, these transmissions have now reached the nearest star systems, where they can be enjoyed by any alien with access to a good aerial and a big bag of nachos.On Earth, live TV drama is dead Well, almost dead.

In recent years, a few experiments have been attempted by production teams hungry for a thrill. The 40th anniversary instalment of Coronation Street was relayed live from the Granada backlot, enlivening its cast’s end-of-the-pier acting with the possibility of an unconcealable cock-up. At George Clooney’s request, the 1997 season of ER opened with a live episode – performed twice so that East and West Coast viewers might have a chance of seeing him miss his mark or drop a swab into an open wound. On millennium night in Denmark, control of the four main TV channels was handed over to Lars von Trier and his colleagues, who produced a quartet of simultaneous live dramas, between which viewers were invited to hop. (We got Michael Parkinson reading from an autocue for 12 hours.)Kate Dunn’s Do Not Adjust Your Set looks back to an era when all TV actors were forced to live with their own mistakes.