David Farnor | On 06, Aug 2023

Note: This review contains spoilers.

It’s not often you read the words “with thanks to Jonathan Swift” in a programme’s titles, but The British Miracle Meat owes more than a debt to the great satirist – and takes more than a bite out of today’s appallingly unequal society. Swift, who penned Gulliver’s Travels, famously tackled poverty and famine in 1729 with the scathing A Modest Proposal – an essay that proposed selling off and eating the children of the poor to solve the food and economic crisis. You may begin to guess where The British Miracle Meat is headed.

Gregg Wallace is perfectly picked to present this 2023 update, as he bounds on to the screen with his exuberant energy turned up to 11. He takes us behind the scenes of Good Harvest, a new company that’s cultivating lab-grown meat – a new, protein-rich produce that’s made “by humans from humans”. Before you can start feeling uneasy in your seat, he goes into Masterchef mode for a taste test of different steaks, praising the “mystery meat” that not only tastes good but also promises to solve the cost of living crisis.

Director Tom Kingsley, of Pls Like and Ghosts fame, is in his element, helping to craft an absurdist parody of cooking programmes that feels grounded and practical even as things get darker and more extreme – all while giving Wallace free rein to smile, gasp and joke with an increasingly nighmarish grin.

The script, meanwhile – from Matt Edmonds and Jonathan Levene – plays its main concept straight and on the nose, but laces it with subtle and painfully observed turns of phrase. “Pain-subjective” as a description for the harvesting process is exactly the kind of innocuous wording that people in positions of authority can wield to dangerous effect – and only makes the denouement all the more quietly horrifying.

The result isn’t the subtlest of satires, but it makes up for that with its sharply targeted anger. Rather than lean into a feature-length odyssey, it keeps its runtime tight and, by not announcing its intents in advance, cooks up that rare thing in modern TV: a real surprise to digest. It doesn’t go down smoothly, which is the whole point.

The British Miracle Meat is available on Channel 4.

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