Andrew Vine: Now nanny state is taking over TV

Banning fry-ups on Coronation Street plumbs new depths of absurdity
Breakfast fry-ups are to be banned from television's Coronation Street. What next? The Rovers Return going teetotal?Breakfast fry-ups are to be banned from television's Coronation Street. What next? The Rovers Return going teetotal?
Breakfast fry-ups are to be banned from television's Coronation Street. What next? The Rovers Return going teetotal?

DON’T drink this. Don’t eat that. Don’t sit down for too long. It’s the chorus of nannying disapproval that has become the soundtrack to everyday life.

Grown adults are being treated like naughty children because of a mindset among those in positions of influence that we are incapable of making informed choices over our health and how to run our lives.

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This censorious, tut-tutting, pursed-lips frown of official disapproval has now turned from what we eat and drink to what we are permitted to watch, and in doing so has plumbed new depths of absurdity.

Is it explicit scenes of sex that we need to be protected from? Graphic depictions of violence?

No, it’s the sight of somebody eating a fry-up. Unbelievably, such scenes are likely to be excised from Coronation Street, on the grounds that they might encourage unhealthy eating.

The notion that seeing a character tucking into bacon and eggs is going to send millions of viewers hurtling into their kitchens to fry the contents of the fridge in a pound of lard is laughable, but this is what Government nannying has come to.

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There are sound commercial reasons for ITV, which makes Coronation Street, to treat shots of a cooked breakfast as if they were hard-core pornography. It is trying to appease the Government and stave off plans for a ban on junk food advertising before the 9pm watershed.

But why stop there? How about making the Rovers Return a teetotal pub, serving nothing stronger than mineral water, even lemonade having been banned on the grounds that its sugar content is a risk to the principal actors’ teeth?

That would hopefully assuage the Government’s increasingly stern stance on alcohol, as personified by the Chief Medical Officer, Dame Sally Davies, who began 2016 with the gloomy declaration that there is no such thing as a “safe” level of alcohol.

Not content with that, Dame Sally, in her role as Nanny-in-Chief, went before a committee of MPs last month and told them that every time she thinks about having a glass of wine, she weighs the risk that it will raise her chances of developing cancer at some point in the future.

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I’d love to be a fly on the wall at a social event attended by Dame Sally where drinks are served.

But she is only the public face of an officialdom that raises the spectre of the Grim Reaper ever more often in its pronouncements on what we eat, drink and how we live.

Its secondary line of attack is the trend for trying to send people on a guilt trip about becoming a burden on the NHS at some unspecified point in the future because they fancy a bacon sandwich now.

It is not the business of those in authority to preach to us, or poke their noses into how we live. There is abundant information out there about healthy eating, moderate alcohol consumption and the need to take exercise.

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Hectoring the public, or proscribing what they can watch characters eat on a popular show, won’t achieve anything except to make ordinary, rational people who observe moderation in their diet and lifestyle ignore the official doom-mongering.

Yes, this country has a child obesity problem, and the Government is right to address it. But that problem is rooted in bad parenting, and demonising the entire adult population for the failings of the few is wrong.

We all make our own choices, and for the vast majority that means being sensible and not waking each day and pondering how much nearer death yesterday’s cheese sandwich for lunch has brought us.

If we were to follow all the official advice to the letter, only monk-like abstemiousness and a daily contemplation of the worst that may – or may not - lie in the future would tick the boxes, and neither are a recipe for happy and fulfilled lives.

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The late Sir Kingsley Amis, who knew a thing or two about drinking, once tartly observed of those who counselled lifelong caution: “No pleasure is worth giving up for the sake of two more years in a geriatric home in Weston-super-Mare.”

So the producers of Coronation Street should not have to fear the consequences of showing fry-ups, and the rest of us shouldn’t be made to feel the sausages in the fridge are weapons of mass destruction. And there is no need to join Dame Sally in gloomy contemplations of mortality when offered the occasional glass. Better by far to accept and raise it to a long and happy life.