Will fresh badger burgers replace Turkey Twizzlers? A new series from Jamie Oliver will champion the culinary merits of roadkill.

In the BBC programme Road Kill Café, viewers are shown how to forage by the roadside for foxes, squirrels and chickens that have met a sticky end.

Fergus Drennan, a food forager who supplies restaurants including The Ivy and Oliver’s Fifteen, demonstrates how to test animals for rigor mortis. If the death is recent, Drennan promises to create a tasty meal from tarmac to table within 24 hours of bumper impact.

The programme, created for BBC Three by Oliver’s Fresh One production company, aims to show that fresh fox, hedgehog and badger have a nutritional value that is greater than supermarket meats.

Drennan, 35, describes himself as a “vegetarian who eats roadkill” because “it has not been killed on your behalf”. He invited locals in Sandwich, Kent, to join him on a three-week foraging expedition. The programme concludes with a banquet of food found on beaches, in forest undergrowth and in roadside gutters.

The RSPCA warned the producers to stay on the right side of the law. A spokeswoman said: “We have welfare concerns over roadkill food. Participants may have to prove that an animal was already dead when they found it. Badgers and deer are protected under the law and it is an offence to possess any part of a badger.”

Drennan, who has been a forager for 15 years, argues that he is reviving skills learnt by our ancestors as they rose to the challenge of survival. He commends roadkill on his website, saying: “It is fresh, local, seasonal and nutritionally rich.”

The programme is accompanied by an appetite-threatening series in which diners follow a meal from farm and abattoir to their table.

Each programme in Meat follows the life and death of one animal. An invited group witnesses the slaughter at a small abattoir of a different species each night.

Once the carcass has been prepared, a butcher explains the different cuts of meat. A chef then prepares a meal for the audience. The BBC said that the programme “demystifies the process of how food ends up on our plates”.

In another new series, a group of “teenage couples” will be sent to live on a housing estate and given babies to look after.

The real parents will observe through CCTV cameras how their offspring fare in The Baby Borrowers. The teenagers, aged 17 to 19, will be given a baby, a toddler and an old person to look after during the experiment.

The programme “takes teenage couples on a rollercoaster ride of adult responsibility and allows them to discover what it’s really like to be a parent”.

BBC Three, the digital channel aimed at a “youth” audience, has enjoyed ratings success with the Doctor Who spin-off, Torchwood. It has commissioned a similar spin-off from the BBC series Spooks and is investing heavily in new comedy after the success of Little Britain.

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