TV review: The Fried Chicken Shop

The message that fast food is unhealthy has been bandied about for so long that a lot of us feel really naughty when we are tucking into our tasty fried fish and chips on a Friday night.

So, I was interested to see how last night's The Fried Chicken Shop on Channel 4 would be presented.

They could easily jump on the health bandwagon and start lecturing us about clogged arteries and heart attacks.

Or, they could leave us alone to enjoy our takeaways and give us an insight into how and why our diet has changed.

It was the latter and the programme went to London where they focussed on an up-and-coming franchise called Roosters Spot.

Roosters Spot looked like most other fried chicken places – not that I go to many, you understand – but it seems today that you can't walk around a town or city without seeing one open, and usually filled with hungry customers.

It is no wonder there seems to be one on every high street as the fast food market is worth over £4 billion annually and there are more than 2,100 different chicken shops in the UK.

At the beginning of the programme we hear that in the past chicken was seen as a bit of a luxury and we would probably have only eaten about one a year – now all that has changed and it is the most popular meat we, as a nation, eat.

The chicken shop they showed in Clapham was flooded with regulars in the week and revellers on the weekend – and it is no wonder they are doing well when they are open 17 hours a day, seven days a week, 364 days a year – they close on Christmas Day.

Thirty-one-year-old British Pakistani Ali runs the shop which is a busy and bustling hub in the community – although it looks to be regularly filled with drunk, and sometimes violent, customers.

The shop is conveniently placed near a large nightclub and so each evening they could serve up to a thousand customers and stay open until 6am.

This is all fairly interesting, up to a point. However, it is hard to believe that anyone at Channel 4 thought it would be good to make an hour-long programme about a fried food shop.

Once you get past the message that we like fried chicken because it is cheap and tasty, there really isn't much left to say.

A lot of the customers seemed to have a screw loose and they looked like the kind of people that you would not like to bump into on a dark night.

The shop also gets visits from drag queens, school kids and university graduates who bark orders in the early hours of the morning.

It really is a melting pot of people, but by the end of the hour-long programme I was really bored.

There were a few interesting stories but I have to admit that if the programme was shown in another country I would be pretty embarrassed.

It made us look like a bunch of rude Neanderthals who eat with our fingers and talk with our mouths full of food.

It was a depressing hour of my life that I will never get back, and a real let-down from Channel 4.

Cathy Spencer