reports Saturday’s Daily Mail:
First her kitchen turned out not to be her kitchen. Now it seems Nigella Lawson’s trip to the shops on a London bus for her cookery show wasn’t quite what it seemed either….
Producers have admitted that they hired the bus Miss Lawson rode on, filling it with extras pretending to read the newspapers as normal passengers.
So while Miss Lawson, 47, was telling viewers to “take the express way to deliciousness”, she was not travelling on public transport at all. Instead she was being filmed by a crew in studio conditions.
“We chose to hire a bus for the day of filming rather than disrupt customers on a normal bus route,” admitted a BBC spokesman.
It’s one thing to build a replica set of Nigella’s kitchen for easier filming and less disruption of her household, but it’s entirely another to make a meal of taking a bus to the shops when it turns out the bus had been hired for the day and filled with actors posing as ordinary passengers!
This latest BBC hypocrisy and fakery will be even worse if it turns out it was cooked up after Nigella was criticised for “Her habit of taking seemingly endless taxis to Waitrose and upmarket delicatessens” as the Mail reports.
If the BBC is unable to film a short programme segment of a bus trip without unduly disrupting fellow travellers why did they bother with the pretension of a Nigella bus trip in the first place?
Read the rest of Alison Boshoff’s article for more details.
Oh Please God, don’t let it also mean her boobs are fake as well. 😎
This is not important. Really. You would do well to continue to focus on what is.
Not that important, no, but it does add to the general case against the BBC being given £3.5 billion of our money a year — why should we give this much money to people who fake so much of their output?
Why do they bother? If they had to fake a bus trip why didn’t they just miss out the trip all together. Do we really need to know how she gets to the shops? Do we really need to know that the food comes from shops? Isn’t that implicit?
It is small beer really but it does just indicate the mentality behind the scenes.
David G: “This is not important. Really. You would do well to continue to focus on what is.”
Thank you for your feedback David – however, even if it’s not important to you, it is of interest (not necessarily the same as importance) to me and other readers of Biased BBC, providing a useful insight into how the BBC goes about producing television and spending our money – but you can have a full refund of every penny you’ve ever paid to read Biased BBC if you want.
Hiring a bus & its crew and a load of actors for a day can’t have been cheap, all for the merest of pointless incidental segments in a cookery show – hardly smacks of the cash-strapped corporation that carps on about its impoverishment in the press does it?
Meanwhile, here’s an excerpt from next week’s show:
“On today’s show we’re going to produce some lovely warm baps, especially for viewer Dave T, who writes that he’s tried them at home, but he’s never quite got the grasp of warm baps like mine”.
it is ridiculous to spend that kind of money to make a cooking program and the bus trip does not add value to her cooking. i seldom watch her program anyway because i find her cooking skill very amatuer. this fake bus trip gives the BBC very bad reputation.
I’d guess they knew if she really got on a bus that she’d stand a very good chance of people interrupting or gawping(as she is so famous), hence the faked bus, but it really is ridiculous.
I agree both that it iS trivial–and that it is worth mentioning as it is, in fact, a deception. If it weren’t they’d just allow somehow for the fact that it is a staged thing–why not? Because it’s meant to deceive.
More “reality” shows ought to be outed this way imho.
Julia Child did a brilliant cooking show here in the US from a “reproduction” of her Boston kitchen that was in no way meant to be taken as authentic–the point was Julia’s personality second, the food first. Nigella(whom I have enjoyed very much)needn’t pretend so much to still be enjoyable or informative.
I’d be interested to learn whether the bus hire company and the extras were mentioned in the credits.
Should such deceptions be flagged up? It sounds less like a shopping trip and more like a reconstruction of a shopping trip. If Nigella were to jump into a taxi instead, the driver might as well be Charlie Slater.
On the BBC’s iPlayer Lawson’s output isn’t in the ‘Entertainment & Comedy’ category, nor filed under ‘Drama’. It’s in ‘Factual’.
I’ve spent zero years in the telly industry and I’ve got a far more sensible idea:
Nigella puts on coat and exits through pretend door.
[Cuts to shop]
Nigella discusses the ingredients she’s after and pretends to buy it.
[Cuts to pretend kitchen]
Nigella returns with bag of produce.
Stunt produce obviously.
I remember watching that show, it was obviously a set up because it was a for hire route master with a rear door, and TBH you can’t just film on a regular bus I think tFL wouldn’t allow it. I thought at the time that’ll get blown out of proportion as a part of the “fake” hysteria. I’m only surprised it has taken so long and that non of the pc brigade have pointed out that few if any on the hired bus were members of “community groups”. I thought at the time they looked like the production office staff.
On the other hand I agree with the view here that it was an expensive and pointless segment to produce demonstrating at best very poor judgement on behalf of the producers.
I don’t think the Two Fat Ladies actually drove everywhere in a motorbike and sidecar either.
“I don’t think the Two Fat Ladies actually drove everywhere in a motorbike and sidecar either”.
Yes, we know that. We know that the programme-makers decided that they would create a misleading impression that this was somehow more real than the usual concocted TV fairy-floss, when it was really the same old floss only slightly more deceitful.
(Nothing hugely wrong with that, but why should we subsidize fairy-floss TV? Perhaps there’s an argument that we should subsidize high culture, but why should we subsidize the nice lifestyle of a rich woman like Nigella, and her play-acting?)
The step on step off buses were ended on 9th December 2005. So it had to be a rental unless there was 2 years delay after filming.
The show iself is bizzare because it is filmed from the point of a baby, only able to focus on faces, breasts and food.
there are still Routemasters in operation on the number 15 ‘heritage’ route.