Posh Nosh

Welcome to the ancestral home of the Marchmonts - Simon and Minty are passionate about all things to do with food, particularly about how you, the viewer who is in desperate need of some high culture, are going to be making and, thought it could be sacrilege, consuming such creations as are brought lovingly to life on this show.

Forget Jamie Oliver, forget Nigella Lawson and Delia Smith, this is a cooking show that is at the very top of the food chain.

(And forget living without fennel - it's the new revolution in cooking, and a trademark of the Marchmonts' restaurant, The Quill And Tassel in Bray, England. Make sure you try the Bread AND Butter Pudding with shaved fennel while you're there.)

Simon and Minty are the to-the-manor-born hosts of the show. While Minty (Arabella Weir) gives us cooking tips (exasperate your vegetables until exhausted; disturb your chestnuts in milk until queasy, then disappoint), Simon (Richard E. Grant) teaches those of us with ordinary tastebuds the finer points of wine selection and consumption.

This show is well written (with Arabella Weir being involved in that writing) - its satire of the cooking shows which now saturate our screens is a welcome change from being told that all these years we've been boiling those eggs all wrong. Chris Langham's directing style can be seen by those familiar with series such as "People Like Us". It's mockumentary style makes the irony behind the dialogue between the show's hosts all that more enjoyable.

The two hosts turn in great performances: Minty is a fallen domestic goddess, somewhere between Nigella Lawson and Delia Smith, who's marriage to Simon seems to have come about because Minty wanted a title and Simon wanted to get marriage out of the way so he could continue his tennis lessons with his strapping spanish male tennis coach. Arabella Weir is delightful as Minty and Richard E. Grant turns in another quality performance of eccentric English aristocratic snobbery.

I've given the show a good rating so far but I'm sure there will be those who disagree. What I say is this: watch for yourself, and if you don't get at least a laugh out of one short and insane episode, check your pulse and go take some lessons in the British sense of irony.

A gleeful satire which takes potshots at celebrity chefs as well as the snobbish upper-class, the only flaw Posh Nosh has is its unfortunately short running time.

Richard E Grant is once again the sneering, superior toff, a role he does exceptionally well, while Arabella Weir's Minty tries to maintain the same nose-in-the-air attitude, ('Lard makes me think of fat people in the co-op - perhaps you're one of them'), but occasionally lets her middle-class roots show.

Highlights include David Tennant's cameos as the object of Simon's not-so-discreet affection, as well as Simon's drunken tirade on the disregard of sauces.

The perfect antidote to the avalanche of cookery programs - most of which try too hard to impress, rather than to entertain or inform.

Posh Nosh is almost entirely about attributing social status value to the preparation, presentation and consumption of food. However, we are also allowed a window to the private lives of these two fictional eccentrics.

Simon may be an arrogant pig, but Minty so values her stylish life as his partner that she chooses to ignore his all-too-apparent extra-marital appetite.

Posh Nosh is the most stylishly delivered and rewarding of very British humour, packed into 9 exquisite ten minute morsels.

Endlessly re-watchable and a joy to be shared proudly with family and friends.

The show follows upper class couple and their posh food. Filmed as cooking show, but it is far more than that. Absolutely pure brittish humour, had to re-watch all episodes to find hidden gems. They are all over the place.