Lots of interesting response to the first episode of Jamie O's campaign Ministry of Food last night.
The Guardian is typical in describing it as "the most powerful documentary in years" - but more for its portrayal of social deprivation than the campaign itself. The "broken Britain" being a popular meme right now.
For this and a whole lot of other reasons, I thought it quite brilliant. If you didn't catch it go here to see again
The great thing for those of us seeking to bring about change in people's behaviour is how Jamie looks set to learn how to spread stuff through trial and error - his own experience
Of course, he's got a lot right
1. focussing on what you can do not what you can say
2. ...on what you can give folk out there to do...
3. ...that they can do with each other
4. ...oh, and make it highly visible and oh, yes fun
But he's learning the hard way the things we've been saying about:
1. Spread is a pull- not a push-thing: you can push all you like but unless you get folk to pull the behaviour through, it won't spread
2. Things don't travel through populations on their own: lots of other things are intertwined (in this case, social deprivation, family structures, education, etc) and these can act as breaks on the propagation of your thing
3. Your agenda is not what matters - you have to make a difference to the agenda of the folks out there in order for your thing to be adopted
4. It is really difficult to predict what's going to take off - you have to try lots of things (which is good for C4 as we've got the rest of the series to go)
This is definitely must-see TV. His best yet, I reckon