So when Welcome to Fatland (ITV1) elbowed its way into our sitting rooms, we weren’t too jolted to hear, once again, the familiar facts: “More than half of British adults are now overweight. One in five is clinically obese. Many of them remain that way for the rest of their lives.” Not jolted enough, at any rate, to be put off our supper. Or seconds, come to that.

But here’s the twist. The makers of this documentary decided to take “five of Britain’s unhappiest heavyweights on the trip of a lifetime, to the world’s first fat-friendly holiday resort”. Why? Was it to feed them steamed fish and mineral water? No, the idea was not to help them shed those pounds, but to make them feel happier in their (stretched) skin.

It’s a novel approach to obesity documentaries: take a bunch of seriously obese men and women and tell them they’re never going to shed the spare human being they’re carting around with them, so they might as well accept their weight and learn to be happy just as they are. It’s a bit like the pilot telling you over the cabin intercom that all the engines have failed and the plane is going to crash, so you might as well salvage the best of a bad situation and have one final snog with whichever passenger is seated next to you; even if she happens to look like Donald Rumsfeld.

First stop was Freedom Paradise, a resort in Mexico that caters to the fuller figure: huge reinforced beds, family-size shower cubicles, all-you-can-eat buffets where nobody mutters or smirks if guests eat a whole tableful of tacos every night. It’s a haven for fat people.

But the icing on the cake for the British travellers, their passport to this new state of graceful selfacceptance, was being given the coaching services of Marilyn, an outsize bleached-blonde the size of John Prescott and Charles Clarke combined, but twice as chirpy.

Marilyn was introduced as “one of America’s most celebrated fatconfidence coaches, and author of the award-winning book Fatsville”. Feel free to take a moment to read that sentence again. Now tell me: which do you find the more surprising, that there is such a thing as a “fatconfidence coach” or that there are enough of them in America to enable Marilyn to stand out as one of the most celebrated of the bunch?

After swearing that she herself wouldn’t want to be thin, Marilyn tried to woo her charges to her fatis-fun world view by way of flattery, synchronised swimming, and a flirting workshop. Some of them shed a few inhibitions, though you suspected this was due more to their finding themselves in the company exclusively of other XXXL people, and thus not feeling as self-conscious as they might in their home environments. As for their reaction to Marilyn, one said: “She just talks b******s.” Marilyn was stung by her pupils’ unreceptiveness. Some said they would visit Freedom Paradise again. But if you asked them if they wanted to enrol in another of Marilyn’s coaching sessions, your hunch is that their answer would be: “Fat chance!”

There are no fat people in Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky (BBC Four), Kevin Elyot’s adaptation of Patrick Hamilton’s bleak trilogy set in a 1930s, sepia-stained London; which is perhaps surprising when you consider the lengths to which the director, Simon Curtis, went to frame scenes to ensure that no modern signposts or telephone kiosks crept into camera shot.

Maybe Curtis was striving for authenticity and most Londoners back then couldn’t afford to scoff enough to be fat. Pity. Had he been able to hire the cast of Fatland as crowd-fillers, they’d have blocked out enough of the landscape to enable Curtis to film in Piccadilly Circus and still not have to worry about anything chronologically anomalous peeping into view.

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