One to watch: Jamie and Jimmy’s Friday night feast - Channel 4, 8pm

The Beeb may have made him famous, but farmer Jimmy Doherty is now a Channel 4 boy through and through, having joined the station’s staple of cookery experts which already included his best mate Jamie Oliver.
Jamie (right) and JimmyJamie (right) and Jimmy
Jamie (right) and Jimmy

And given that they’re such good friends, it’s only right that they should come together for one big, erm, feast of a show.

Presenting from their caff on Southend Pier, Jamie has devised recipes with the ‘wow’ factor to impress friends and family, while Jimmy’s role is more experimental, as he shows how to cook food you wouldn’t normally think to try at home with some DIY food builds. Plus, some special guests will be dropping by to help serve up all the pukka food. And as if that little lot wasn’t enough to whet your appetite, the lads will be taking to the roads of Britain and trying to save some of our best regional foods from extinction, as well as getting a helping hand in the kitchen from some very familiar faces.

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Pairing these two chefs together is quite a stroke of genius from those leading lights at Channel 4, but it’s no surprise, as past series have gone down a treat in the past, most notably Jamie and Jimmy’s Food Fight. The chefs put their heads together in 2012 and opened the aforementioned end-of-pier pop-up cafe, with cameras following them as they embarked on light-hearted continental food battles. This new series is, well, very much the same in a sense (if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it) - food, the cheeky chappies, and a barrage of culinary expertise as they demonstrate how to make recipes to impress.

And given their humour, we can probably expect plenty of banter along the way. Farmer Doherty once told the Guardian about their friendship: “I’ve known Jamie Oliver since I was four, we grew up in the same Essex village. I remember choking him by standing on his cloak when we played the three wise men in the school nativity play. We were a couple of little gits - they put us in the special needs class.”

He added: “Jamie’s passion for food was evident from a very early age. He used to buy a big jar of aniseed twists that he’d keep in his locker and knock them out to the other kids for cheaper than the local sweet shop. They were never quite the right weight.”

Fast forward a decade or three, and the two are now tackling this six-part series, as they try to garner excitement for foods that are quickly heading towards extinction, such as Lancashire’s Tosset cake, Colchester pudding and Nottinghamshire’s Colwick cheese.

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In the first helping, the world’s fastest man Usain Bolt, cooks his aunt Lily’s jerk pork, while Jamie cooks the ultimate steak.

Plus, Jimmy will be making a tandoor oven out of a dustbin and flowerpot.

Blimey, stick with this lot, and we’ll never go hungry again...

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