Let them eat cake

On top of a filing cabinet at my company’s offices there is regularly an open tub of chocolates, inviting anyone passing to dip in and grab themselves an Orange Creme, a Golden Barrel, a Mini Flake, or all three. I pass the chocolates en route to the office kitchen to make myself a cup of tea. However, I don’t partake. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the gesture, but for at least the last three years I’ve been Type 2 diabetic and therefore chocolate in all its forms, along with bread, pasta and almost all the foods containing ‘complex’ carbs, are no longer my friend. 

It’s my own fault: I indulged too much in such things and gained a lot of weight that clogged up my pancreas until it stopped working properly. That’s the broad science of it. Now, like an alcoholic never touching another drop for fear of returning to addiction, I mostly avoid carbs to prevent myself going blind, losing my feet or needing kidney dialysis if I let blood sugar levels return to where they were when I was first diagnosed.

You can’t survive by not consuming carbohydrate, however. It’s just that I have to look out for things that contain too much of it and not eat them. Occasionally I’ll have a pint of Guinness, but I’ll stick to just the one before moving on to water or a diet drink. It doesn’t bother me. I can still be sociable, it’s just that I’d prefer to remain sociable for as long as I can. I don’t get resentful, either: I’ve grown used to my own family consuming chocolate around me (usually around nine in the evening), in much the same way as I’ve long rejected any envy over people eating sandwiches, pasta or naan bread in front of me. I know what it can do to me, so I let it go.

However, the chairwoman of Britain’s leading food watchdog has another view. People bringing things like cake into the office for colleagues should be considered, she says, as harmful to their health as passive smoking. “We all like to think we’re rational, intelligent, educated people who make informed choices the whole time,” Professor Susan Jebb of the Food Standards Agency said, speaking in a personal capacity. “I have made a choice, but people were making a choice to go into a smoky pub.”

Whilst not saying the two issues are completely identical, she has combined them into the same thinking. The Times reported her as saying: “With smoking, after a very long time, we have got to a place where we understand that individuals have to make some effort but that we can make their efforts more successful by having a supportive environment. But we still don’t feel like that about food.”

Frankly, I’ve never equated smoking and someone leaving a birthday cake in a communal area at work, even in working cultures where someone is always bringing in confectionary. As an ex-smoker, too, I’m also conscious of what my fumes did for those I worked with when I last smoked, almost 30 years ago (including - ugh - in a small office with two non-smokers). 

I get the point, though. Two-thirds of adults in the UK are classed as overweight and a quarter obese. Worse, Type 2 diabetes now accounts for one-in-twelve UK adults, with cases in children and young adults quadrupling in Britain since 1990 - a faster increase than anywhere else in the world (rubbishing the idea that it is a condition of middle-age). Type 2 diabetes is mostly lifestyle-induced, too and - to some extent - self-inflicted. And I’m more than conscious that my own lack of self-restraint now contributes to the £6 billion obesity-related health conditions cost the NHS.

Politicians have argued for and against other measures to curb unhealthy lifestyles, such as banning the advertising of junk food, much as cigarette marketing was outlawed years ago, or stopping retailers from offering two-for-one deals on treats. Jebb, too, has added to this debate, telling The Times: “Advertising means that the businesses with the most money have the biggest influence on people’s behaviour. That’s not fair. At the moment we allow advertising for commercial gain with no health controls on it whatsoever and we’ve ended up with a complete market failure because what you get advertised is chocolate and not cauliflower.”

At the end of the day it is all about choice. And that choice requires strength of discipline. The brain is also very clever in prompting temptation, or forgetfulness. We can too easily mindlessly graze our way through a plate of biscuits left in a meeting room, or that box of Celebrations passed around without thinking - if we let ourselves, that is. 

Food brands are obliged these days to include nutritional facts on their packaging, which for someone like me who has to make a smart decision is extremely helpful. But is the solution that bad foods should be outlawed altogether? Of course not. Even I can have that occasional Guinness, though with 18g of carbs per pint, your granny was right in calling it a meal in a glass. Moderation is key which, I know, is often easier said than done. Harder is finding healthier food choices when eating out, and here is where I’d like to see the hospitality industry do more. Some pubs and restaurants do understand: asking to remove potatoes or chips from an order and replace them with salad is increasingly easier. More and more establishments get the idea of ‘bunless burgers’ or ‘burritos-in-a-bowl’, too. But I appreciate that as a  diabetic I remain in the minority. Plus, you can’t vouch for the sugar and salt used in recipes - avoidance is, I’ve accepted, only a mitigation.

Actually, the worst place I’ve ever experienced for food is, counter-intuitively, a hospital. When I spent time as in-patient for a diabetes-related condition a couple of years ago my breakfast choices would either be cereal or scrambled egg on white toast. Every morning. I chose a small dollop of the egg every day, with the only bonus being an added sausage on Sundays. Dinner would be whatever meat and vegetables I could extract from a lasagne. 

While I’ve got on top of things, and smugly lost weight to, now, manage my condition, others aren’t so diligent. Obesity and overeating are diseases in their own right. There are psychological reasons why some people eat themselves into being overweight, despite longstanding public information about the risks. But a nanny state is not the answer. Of course, the NHS could be more interventionist, but given pressures on the health service and GP surgeries in general, for a doctor to instruct someone to lose weight probably requires an in-person appointment, and would usually only come about because the individual is there for something else. No one, I suspect, rings up their GP to say “I’m fat - help me”.

“If a doctor comes across somebody with high blood pressure, they would feel, culturally, by training, by guidelines, by practice, that they must offer this patient treatment for their high blood pressure and explain to them why it was important,” Susan Jebb told The Times. “At the moment, if a doctor comes across a patient who is overweight, they mostly ignore it. The status in medicine comes from treating rare diseases with very expensive medicine and technology, and obesity isn’t either of those.”

She has a point. Obesity has, weirdly, been accepted culturally. I used to watch the American sitcom Roseanne and never once thought that Roseanne Barr’s titular character or her screen husband John Goodman were putting their health at risk by being large people. It almost seemed like a blue collar badge of honour. The Sopranos was, more or less, about hefty, masculine men who ate mounds of spaghetti-and-clams, wore oversized untucked shirts, and were more likely to die from a rival’s 9mm bullet than heart failure. Thanks to these cultural references I, too, embraced the large untucked shirt look because they allowed me to be fat without, apparently, consequences. 

When I lived in America, and on my many visits there since, I embraced the drive-through culture that put me literally at arms-length reach of a supersized burger-and-fries combo from the comfort of a car. The contradiction here, though, is that in America there are, actually, plenty of healthy food choices, and healthy lifestyle opportunities are everywhere. In California, where I lived, you worked alongside trim-looking joggers, gym-goers and outdoor junkies whose cars had bike and ski racks permanently mounted on them. Even in “overweight America”, you had a clear choice.

I’ve clearly made some bad ones, and didn’t realise that I had. But today, I walk past that open tub of Roses because I can. It’s another choice. It just shouldn’t have to be everybody else’s.

Still listening?

Picture: Paramount/Gale Adler

The history of cherished TV shows being revived long after they’ve disappeared in their prime has not always been a happy one. For every success - a Doctor Who, say - you could cite the disappointing Open All Hours, relaunched without the deceased Ronnie Barker, or the recent attempt at reviving Will & Grace. Half the problem is that TV companies, much like their first cousins the film studios, have an interest in retreading something old and familiar rather than commission something new. 

Inevitably, this risks messing with the very magic that made a property much loved to begin with (the 2016 Dad’s Army film did just that - an awkward homage that failed to justify its rationale of updating a TV series that has arguably never been bettered). Some expired properties live on as spinoffs: you could easily argue that Better Call Saul is actually better than Breaking Bad, of which it serves as a prequel. 

Some, though, don’t live up to expectation. Matt Le Blanc’s Friends offshoot Joey was never the snappy ensemble piece of its parent. Even that highly anticipated one-off Friends reunion - planned for last May but shelved by the pandemic - hasn't exactly had people holding their breath in anticipation. Don't get me wrong, Friends was wonderful, 30 years ago in its pomp, and still holds its own in endless syndication, but are we really that desperate to see Rachel, Monica, Chandler, Joey, Phoebe and Ross in middle age? The whole premise of Friends was a group of twentysomethings living in New York. When it ended, with parenthood and suburban living, it felt like it had run its natural course.

So it’s with some apprehension that we read that Frasier is coming back, 17 years after it came to a timely end in one of the greatest sitcom finales ever. Paramount announced this week that Kelsey Grammer will reprise his role as Dr. Frasier Crane for a brand new run as an anchor of its new digital streaming service Paramount+. 

Demand may, then, meet supply in helping Paramount+ off the ground with a much-loved property like Frasier. But as Roseanne found, when it returned briefly, a revival is not helped if its principal then goes and does something stupid: Roseanne Barr brought it all abruptly to an end by posting a racist tweet (“repugnant”, in the words of the ABC Network president) that got her fired. 

That, though, didn’t hold back the reinvention of the show as The Conners - arguably the first ever spinoff of a reboot. It's still going, unlike Will & Grace which returned after 11 years away only to last three seasons before getting axed. In truth, it was no longer that funny, seemingly retreading old jokes around the central four characters and not offering much new. 

Frasier was, you’ll recall, a spinoff from the equally loved Cheers, and it’s still a matter of debate as to which was the better, both being blessed with faultless casting and faultless writing. Frasier ported one of Cheers’ supporting characters and turned him into the centrepiece of a new ensemble, built around the concept of the divorced and hoity-toity psychiatrist moving into a swanky Seattle apartment with his decidedly blue collar dad, and his scampish pet dog. The dynamic was brilliantly expanded by the addition of Crane’s younger and even more neurotic brother, Niles (David Hyde Pierce), and an English physical therapist, Daphne Moon, who looked after the brothers’ father while becoming the secret, and then not so secret love interest to the junior Crane sibling. Even Eddie the dog became a distinctive character in his own right, earning his own front cover on America's showbiz digest Entertainment Weekly. Rightfully, the show won 37 Emmy Awards over the course of 11 seasons, with Grammer and Pierce winning four between them, along with Golden Globes and Screen Actors Guild gongs. 

This week's announcement placed Frasier’s revival as the headline act of Paramount+, and was accompanied by a suitably ‘corporate’ quote from Grammer, saying that he would “gleefully anticipate sharing the next chapter in the continuing journey of Dr. Frasier Crane.” However, it is not yet known who would be joining him on that journey: John Mahoney, the Lancashire-born actor who played Crane’s irascible ex-cop dad Martin, died of cancer in 2018; Jane Leeves, the other British cast member (who played Daphne, ironically as a Lancastrian, even though she was born in Essex), said earlier this month that had no intention of giving up her role in the US medical drama series The Resident to do the then-rumoured Frasier reboot. 

The joy of Frasier - much like Cheers - was that it was cleverly multi-dimensional. Frasier may have been the pivot - be it plot lines focused on his Seattle radio station, the relationship with Niles, or their dynamic with Martin - but there was also Martin's dynamic with Daphne, and Daphne’s ‘will-they-won’t-they’ relationship with Niles. For me, at least, it made Frasier ‘appointment TV’ on a Friday night. As for the new series, Paramount promised “more exactly the same than ever”, but wouldn’t be drawn on storylines or casting, including the likelihood of Pierce returning. Grammer himself had previously said that he wouldn’t revive the show without his on-screen brother, surely one of the most serendipitous casting decisions in television history (a happy accident - originally there wasn’t going to be a brother until a casting manager saw a 10x8 of Pierce and saw what appeared to be a strong family resemblance). 

In Cheers, the educated, pompous and ever-so slightly snooty Frasier Crane was the fish out of water amongst the bar flies he drank with in Boston. Frasier flipped personas in moving to Seattle, with his ex-cop dad and the Mancunian Daphne becoming the grounded points of reference, leaving the brothers to fuss over fine wines, Debussy and the cut of their well appointed suits.

Quite what the Frasier reboot will be like, then, remains wide open. When a potential return first surfaced in 2018, Grammer told The Guardian that there would be risks: “It would be quite a breathtaking failure to try to do it and not do it better than the previous show - and I think that’s almost impossible. To pick up that responsibility would be a very brave thing to do.” A year later the subject came up again, but this time Grammer put a little more substance behind ideas that were clearly under consideration, including setting the show in a city other than Crane's home town. “We’ll see how people respond to it because it’s not going to be the same place, it’s not going to be Seattle,” Grammer said in 2019. “It’s not going to be the same Frasier, it’s going to be the man in his next iteration.”  

That man has, in truth, gone through two reinventions, with his own show and a guest appearance by Grammer as the character in a crossover episode of the sitcom Wings. But what garnered all those Emmys during its run between 1993 and 2004, building to an audience of 37 million in the US alone for its final episode, was the combination of saturated creativity - a vast team of show runners, producers and writers - and a core ensemble cast who lived in our hearts for thirty minutes every week. Only Fools And Horses comes to mind as an equivalent (although that had just one writer behind it). 

Here lies the key to whether the reboot will work. “Great television is about creating characters that resonate with audiences and creating universes that viewers want to spend time within," Tim Glanfield, editorial director of the Radio Times said this week. And from that, he said, some shows create a genuine emotional need. “The characters are missed, the world it occupied is mourned for, a little gap is left in people's lives, and audiences often ask, 'why couldn't they have made more?’”.

Picture: NBC

The compulsion will be for Frasier’s producers to do their damnedest to bring back as many of the original cast as possible, simply as that was where the magic lived. Cryptically, when appearing on James Corden’s US chat show in 2019, he hinted that any reboot would be a “third act” rather than a continuation. “The same group of characters, but in a different setting,” he said. “Something has changed in their lives.” Quite what, we don’t know, but it's wise to suspect that it will not be the sort of franchised reinvention that Blackadder went through. All of the principle cast - if they commit - will have aged (even the lad who played Frasier and Lillith Crane’s son, Frederick, is now 32), which, like the Friends reunion, might either inspire the creative premise, or be its failure. Hopefully we will find out, if Paramount confirms details of when - and where - the reboot will appear.

The bigger challenge, arguably, is how Frasier will connect with its audiences. Unlike Friends, the show was never a feature of younger viewing habits. Since it came off air, anyone under the age of thirty will have become hooked on the myriad reality series that keep the streaming services afloat. But, like the Friends reunion, I’m sure there will be a quorum of viewers eager to recreate their Friday evenings in the '90s, settling down at 9pm in eager anticipation of that jazzy xylophone riff and an animated squiggle of Seattle’s Space Needle, welcoming us into Crane’s KACL radio studio. All followed by Grammer’s mellifluous baritone saying the words: “I’m listening”.