Gregg Wallace: The British Miracle Meat, review: like Black Mirror starved of subtlety

“I’m in a human meat plant in Lincolnshire,” says Gregg Wallace, as he wanders around a factory in customary fashion saying: “Wow!” a lot. Yes, you heard him right. Gregg Wallace: The British Miracle Meat (Channel 4) saw our intrepid presenter visit Good Harvest, which grows meat from human cells as a cheap solution to the cost-of-living crisis. 

You can find their steaks, sausages and burgers in your local supermarket chiller cabinet. Except you can’t, obviously. It was clear from the beginning that this curious little half-hour show was a satire. The only question was: to what end? We had to wait until Wallace’s closing lines to find out. 

Penned by comedy writer Matt Edmonds – and “with thanks to Jonathan Swift” in the credits – it stuck closely to the template of Inside the Factory and other consumer food programmes. Wallace didn’t ham up his role, but that’s because his normal presenting style is maximum ham. 

First, he took a tour of the factory floor, where slivers of human tissue were grown into a 30kg “protein cake”. Are you feeling queasy yet? How about when the chap overseeing the production line explained that this was all thanks to Brexit: “Under EU law, we couldn’t possibly operate machines like this due to legislation. But now we can harvest people and pay them for their flesh!” Hard-up people volunteer to be donors, you see. 

Wallace took three steaks for a taste test with Michel Roux Jr (gamely demonstrating his acting skills), and explained that Steak A was grown from Alison, 45, an NHS nurse and part-time delivery driver. It was chewy because Alison was releasing a lot of stress hormones. The most tender, melt-in-the-mouth steak was from a mystery source, revealed (though you surely guessed) in a later boardroom scene to be from a child. 

Grimly, we saw a group of these children – volunteered by their cash-strapped parents and grandparents – being readied for surgery. The CEO beamed that the meat would be a big seller: “It’s all gravy, baby, because our babies taste great with gravy.” She offered Wallace a snack: “Toddler tartare?” When Wallace asked if the surgery was painful, she replied smoothly and nonsensically: “It’s pain subjective,” which was the only slick line in the script. 

The show certainly held the attention thanks to the sheer oddness of Wallace being involved. At the end, he revealed the point of it all: a warning that the cost-of-living crisis has left people ever more reliant on food banks, with a quote taken from the Trussell Trust website calling for “a benefits system that works for everyone and secure incomes so people can afford the essentials”. But the preceding half hour hadn’t brought that point home. It would have worked far better as an advert for vegetarianism. Instead it played out like a Black Mirror episode stripped of cleverness and subtlety.

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