There was a choice scene in Jamie Oliver’s new TV series this week when he walked on to a football pitch at half-time to urge Rotherham United fans to give up their greasy, burger-van ways and sign up for a cookery lesson instead. He was duly rewarded for his efforts with a rousing chorus of “He’s a w***er”.

Oh, how predictable. Football fans call everyone w***ers – even their own players – so they were always going to dish abuse to a fancy-jacketed millionaire chef. So why did the producers send him there? Because this kind of footage was exactly what they wanted. Jamie’s Ministry of Food may in theory be about teaching cooking skills to the masses, but in practice it is about reinforcing factual programming’s most cherished stereotype: the working-class Neanderthal.

Roll up and see the thick bird who eats 70 bags of crisps a week. Be amazed at the single mother who feeds her kids nothing but doner kebabs. Behold as St Jamie, our Christ figure, is jeered and mocked by the mob en route to Calvary – sorry Rotherham v Barnet – and whose sermon is drowned out by a loud rendition of “You fat bastard” (ironically, Jamie was indeed chubbier than some of those he sought to help).

If there were no fat, poor people in this country I do wonder what TV executives would fill their schedules with. They can’t get enough of them, adoring scenes in which, ideally, a 15-stone single mother sucking on a Lambert & Butler with six children and a rusting fridge in the garden wheezes: “Life’s just so ’ard after I’ve bought me fags, cider and scratchcards. There’s ’ardly owt left for t’kids.” Programmes such as Wife Swap are often mere fig leaves for the real business of making a peep show out of unter-mensch behaviour. Why are we so obsessed with this strand of society? Maybe we’ve got such low self-esteem that it cheers us to lie back on our DFS sofas and laugh at slatterns who think that focaccia is a swear word.

It’s a shame because Jamie Oliver is better than this. He’s a nice man, a talented, charismatic force for good who genuinely likes people and is obviously sincere in his desire to stop them morphing into walking heart attacks. But lately there is a messianic glint in his eye that suggests that he is slipping over to the crazed side. Perhaps he has read too much of his own PR bumf and really believes that he was sent to save us. “I just know . . . that I’m enriching her life,” he said as a young mother wept over her debts. If Jamie isn’t careful people will start backing away from him at parties thinking he’s going to whip out some Watchtower pamphlets.

The fat crisis is becoming an emergency, we’re told. At the National Obesity Forum in London this week, it was claimed that three out of four people are now overweight. Oliver and his film-makers chose Rotherham because it is the obesity capital of Britain. And I would agree that the idea of a family who eat nothing but slimy takeaways from Styrofoam boxes, as Natasha and her children do, is enough to make one bring up one’s Yakult breakfast.

But the problem for the programme’s message is that Natasha is not obese; she’s not even overweight. Ditto most of the other unhealthy eaters chosen for his special group. So these people are being filmed solely because they lack cooking skills. Well there are thousands of people, rich and poor, who are guilty of that. Why pick on this lot particularly? Could it possibly be another route back to TV’s favourite soft target – the council-estate, single mother?

Oliver actually comes closer to unlocking a different issue – the complexity of modern poverty and its pillion passengers of borderline depression, anxiety and sometimes (but not always) obesity. How come they’ve got no decent food in the fridge but they can afford a 50in plasma TV, commentators moan? Because of years of interest-free credit and “buy now, pay later” deals, that’s why.

The most informative bit of the whole programme came when Natasha broke down, admitting to an open-mouthed Oliver that she hadn’t been keeping up her healthy cooking regime because she was fretting about her bills and “embarrassing things”. She didn’t elaborate but we can guess: final demands, loan sharks, pawn shops. The gap between their lives became a canyon as she confessed that she had sold her jewellery and couldn’t face cooking because she was so worried that she felt sick. I can’t spare the bus fare to go and buy the fresh meat for your recipes, she sobbed to a man who’ll never know what it’s like to have 50p left in your purse.

To Oliver’s credit, the penny seems to have dropped for him that poverty-induced apathy isn’t solved simply by learning how to lightly fry a tuna steak. This is inconvenient for a televi-sion medium that increasingly simplifies the world in terms of heroes or villains, hardworking or feckless.

Julie Critchlow, the Rotherham chip shop worker who, in 2006, was filmed passing fast food through the school railings to children and was subsequently called a “big old scrubber” by Oliver, is a star of this series. It turns out that, contrary to stereotype, she cooks regularly for her family using fresh meat and veg. She just doesn’t believe in shoving it down other people’s throats. And the truth is that sometimes there’s worse to worry about.

The Daily Mirrorthis week revealed that since filming ended Julie and her husband, floored by the credit crunch, have handed back the keys to their home of 18 years because they can no longer afford the £1,075-a-month mortgage. With this sort of problem playing out across the country, little wonder that people have bigger fish to fry than shopping for asparagus.

Anyway, if St Jamie does succeed in getting the entire country to eat healthily and learn about food, whither those poor TV executives? Rid the country of ignorant porkers, Jamie, and you’ll give the factual programming industry a nervous breakdown.

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