As I am reminded every time I look in the mirror, tackle stairs or find myself turning the pages of a Lands’ End catalogue with increasing interest – a lot can happen in 25 years. Do you, for instance, remember The Naked Chef , the series that launched the career of highly personable, highly enthusiastic Jamie Oliver? That was in 1999. I know! Chefs grow up so fast these days ! A lot of further series (including Jamie’s Kitchen , Jamie at Home , Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals , Jamie’s 15 Minute Meals , Jamie’s 5 Ingredient Meals ) followed, along with a slew of wildly successful cookbooks, a restaurant chain and some high-profile campaigning, most famously for better school dinners (in which he basically asked the very reasonable question of why the Government and we as a society see fit to cram the nutritional equivalent of breadcrumbed shite down our children’s gullets five days a week). Now he has announced his latest show: a two-part series for Channel 4 in partnership with Tefal, the kitchen appliance manufacturer, called Jamie’s Air Fryer Meals . Even for someone who has made his name by catering to mass trends (the 30/15 minute series were a response to the time pressures most family cooks
Labour under, and recent years’ One -Pan Wonders , £1 Wonders and Cooking for Less have been in reaction to the cost-of-living crisis, for example), this one has an inescapable whiff of desperation about it. Which prompts me to ask one of my favourite questions – how much is enough ? A couple of years ago Oliver was estimated to be worth around £173m. That’s down from the 2014 estimate of £240m, sure but it would still buy you a lot of £1 wonders. Of course, I understand that this isn’t all in a pile of cash at home (I mean, that’s how I sort of think of it, but I know really that it’s partly the value of his businesses and the ineffable “brand”). But whatever way you slice it, it is still a lot of money and enough, one might have thought, to allow him to pick and choose between projects, some of which must surely not prompt the response “Air fryer meals? In partnership with Tefal? Jeez Louise”. I think most of us reckon that, if we only had the luck, there is a point at which we would have made enough money to think to ourselves, “Right! That is me DONE!”, set down our tools and stride off into the sunset to enjoy a long and happy retirement, possibly with a spot of light volunteering to keep us from feeling entirely immoral and useless, without a backwards glance. Read Next So Jamie Oliver wishes he wasn't famous? Let's unpick that, shall we But I increasingly think this can’t be true. You hear of investment bankers and the like getting out of the game at 30 or 40 with their millions – but they generally get back into some other game thereafter. It seems unlikely that
Mark Zuckerberg ,
Jeff Bezos or the rest of their ilk will ever cash out (Elon Musk seems determined to throw good money after bad on X, but this is not quite the same thing). There seems to be something that money, however sophisticated the methods become to acquire it, does to our little lizard brains that stops us ever truly believing you can have too much of the stuff. Not just money, of course – there is fame and there is power too (although these are also two excellent ways of making money, so I’m not sure they can be completely disentangled in our lizard brain bits). All the things that are bad for us and/or humanity, it seems, we are programmed to desire helplessly. There is no equivalent of the Kardashians for vaccine-delivery programmes or kale-eating. There is
Bill Gates, the last of what I suspect we will come to think of as the old-school billionaire class, prepared to give back some of his fortune to the world that made it possible to create it. But it is telling that the treatment of his philanthropy – in the media and in smaller conversations – is tinged always with a hint of bafflement. That’s how unnatural it seems. All of which does suggest that humanity is, ultimately, doomed. It may be time to make our peace with that. Or embark – like, soon as, I would suggest – on finding a place to hunker down and wait out the coming apocalypse. Your best bet for this, alas, is befriending a billionaire with a state-of-the-art bunker or becoming one yourself and building one instanter. Don’t forget the air fryer.