TV review: Horsemeat Banquet

But as the days passed, as Ikea hotdogs joined Tesco burgers in being withdrawn from the supermarket shelves, so it became inevitable someone would decide to serve up platters of the stuff most of us have been unwittingly eating to a group of daring diners for our viewing pleasure.

I was convinced it would be Channel 4 – they take pride in being first with all things 'edgy' – but BBC3 beat them to it.

We were warned to expect scenes we might find upsetting – surely that was a given? We were watching a programme called 'Horsemeat Banquet' after all? Anyway, it went swiftly downhill from there.

Not only did the face of Tool Academy, Rick Edwards, appear on the screen, but almost as distasteful was a grisly montage of hanging raw meat, pools of blood and what looked like instruments of torture presumably used to carve the beautiful beasts.

Then we were introduced to our motley crew of trusted tasters, who were all vociferously anti-eating-equine (Presumably finding someone, anyone, who would take a more interesting stance was too much work for the licence fee funded researchers at BBC3).

Edwards by now was in his egotistical element, making quips about how we'd been 'chowing down on my little pony for months' and mixing 'a little bit of Red Rum in our spag bol'. Eye-rolling stuff.

It was time for our education, an attempt of sorts to redress the balance and persuade our reluctant risk-takers to sample some of the dishes they were on TV to try. We were told horse is a 'super-meat', high in protein, low in fat.

There was a nagging – pardon the pun – feeling taking hold, however. Namely, the programme – utterly flawed in its conception – was predictably missing the point.

At the heart of the scandal is not the identity of the animal being sneaked into our food, but the fact it is being sneaked in at all.

Perhaps expecting this programme to shine a revealing light on Horsegate was always a forlorn hope. But it could at least claim one interesting find – in the shape of something scientists couldn't identify.

A random testing of takeaway food threw up some shock results.

A donor kebab was amazingly found to contain lamb and no offal.

But a lamb curry – well it wasn't lamb. It wasn't mutton. Or beef. Not chicken either. No trace of horse nor goat.

Thankfully, neither was it human. What it was remains a mystery – and suggests as suspected by many observers that the horsemeat scandal has a few furlongs to run yet.

Forty minutes in and our dinner guests were just about to try their second course (although all but two skipped the nauseating looking raw starter).

But then we were diverted to a pointless piece about 'sourcing a horse' which ended with a charming image of a pile of horse manure.

A picture which was worth a thousand words when it came to this show.

Mark Mudie