The Delicious Miss Dahl, BBC Two, review

By Kylie O"Brien 604PM GMT twenty-three March 2010

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Sophie Dahl in her new show The Delicious Miss Dahl Photo BBC

Do we need an additional finished at home goddess? Sophie Dahl, one-time pin-up for the size-16 girl-with-an-appetite, is recreating herself as a blonde Nigella so shamelessly you roughly have to admire her. The Delicious Miss Dahl (BBC Two) is similar to Nigella Bites monstrously indulgent, during that the poetic Sophie gives her musings and witterings, her feelings about food and family and roughly anything that pops in to her head.

What you get is a flowery, girlie mixture of selling and grandmothers recipes. And, in box were disturbed about her attribute with food, what with her being a former catwalk indication with weight issues, she lets us know at each event that she likes food, honest she does, and she unequivocally wants to cook. "I could have a pedicure," she told us as the camera followed her out shopping, "but in progress is so most some-more happy-making."

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For her entrance we had "selfish dishes Sophies prime recipes for entertaining herself up. First, a breakfast of omelette Arnold Bennett 3 eggs, crème fraîche, Parmesan, lemon and haddock. You can have this with stand in thickk cream and full-fat cheese, so this is a lighter version for the girl-about-town. It was prettily done, but how most some-more sparkling is Nigellas breakfast-for-one, a masalla omelette with coriander and spices?

On to lunch, bruschetta with bovine animal mozzarella and sourdough bread. Very Nigella, who is herself a dab palm at a good bruschetta with avocado and sourdough bread. Sophies mozzarella "I sort of dream about this cheese," she pronounced was surfaced with shaves of yellow courgette and fennel, piled with packet leaves and fennel tops. It looked great, uninformed and charming (mint, though? Not so sure).

To the undiluted dinner, roasted halibut, a "manly" fish, with spinach and watercress sauce. "Theyre well known as starved eaters," she pronounced of halibut, "something we have in common." Pudding was chocolate pot with cherries, that sounded improved than it looked a chocolate muck spooned in to coffee mugs soon stored in the refrigerator "for when Im feeling some-more sharing".

Delicious Sophie has a lot going for her she is honestly likeable but sadly she isnt a healthy in the kitchen. Her peanut butter and chocolate fudge roughly degraded her. She found all this blending things together in a play flattering tough going "Mrs Obama and Madonna would have shining fudge," she said. "Its all in the biceps." Sophie, by contrast, handles food with the fastidiousness of a laboratory partner some-more Keira Knightley meets Bree from Desperate Housewives than, well, Nigella. One of Sophies anecdotes was utterly droll a beloved she invited behind to repast ran off prior to he got to the chocolate pudding. The rat.

One man whod never have incited down the possibility of food and sex was Edward VII, drastic philanderer and sensualist who died 100 years ago in May. His gargantuan appetites were distinguished in a Timewatch Special, Edward VII Prince of Pleasure (BBC Two). Known as Dirty Bertie and Edward the Caresser, hed think zero of a 12-course feast, had baths for dual filled wholly with champagne and continually visited Parisian brothels. Talking heads Tristram Hunt and biographers Jane Ridley and Philip Ziegler recounted his exploits with gusto, similar that he would have finished an glorious cooking companion.

Yet his mother, Queen Victoria, loathed him "Whenever I see Bertie, I shudder," she said. The immature Bertie was carefully thought about by a phrenologist who spoken his brain to be handicapped and abnormal, but Bertie refused to change; make-up him off to Army stay in Ireland finished not the smallest difference, conjunction did marrying him off to Alexandra of Denmark (an desirous match, as the Danish justice was a conformist place since to ridicule romps rather than erudition). His affairs enclosed a catastrophic attribute with Lady Harriet Mordaunt, whose father dragged Bertie to a divorce court. Lady Harriet was committed to a goofy haven where she remained for the rest of her life.

He came to the bench an overweight, 59-year-old clearly destroyed case. But he rebuilt a dazzling, extravagantly successful coronation, revamped Buckingham Palace and, opposite all the odds, incited out to be intensely popular.

The most appropriate of this was the strange footage. Bertie (who from his thirties onwards resembled Clement Freud) was presumably intensely fat, nonetheless the spin of the century movie shows him to be usually softly plump. Were people thinner in those days? Perhaps they could have finished with some-more of the Delicious Miss Dahl. Or, indeed, Nigella.