Watch Out England, Jamie Oliver Thinks You’re All Quite Drunk

Jamie Oliver is a passionate man. He wouldn’t say that himself, mind you - he prefers the term ‘passthszszthionurnk’ - but he is.

And right now, the subject that Jamie Oliver has decided to get most passionate of all about is British drinking culture. Jamie Oliver has told a French magazine that he’s dismayed at how British people would rather get hopelessly drunk than enjoy a delicious platter of painstakingly-prepared food.

No shit Sherlock. Have you ever tried throwing a chair through a pub window after eating a big roast dinner? You’d be lucky not to get a stitch. Jamie Oliver, you really are an enormous goon.

Everyone knows that getting drunk is the best thing in the whole wide world. The camaraderie, the relaxed inhibitions, the stumbling, the chlamydia, the gigantic skull-cracking headache the next morning that makes you want to kill yourself - yes, being shithammered is possibly the best thing in the universe.

But readers, it’s something that Jamie Oliver wants to ban. The great big sod.

You see, in recent years Jamie Oliver has become a sort of big-tongued crusader who’s at his happiest when he’s out on the street tirelessly drumming up support for one campaign or another. In recent years, Jamie Oliver has attached his firebrand mindset to the following:

* Making children eat delicious school dinners

* Banning battery-reared chickens

* Training poor people to be chefs

* Sort of making people in England cook a bit like the Italians do or something

* The wonderful - and barnstormingly inexpensive - variety of food that’s available to buy at Sainsbury’s. Sainsbury’s: try something new today

* The angelic sounds of Toploader

* Pronouncing his wife’s name in a way that makes him sound like a farting hippo.

And now it’s onto binge drinking. Even though binge-drinking is as traditional a British pursuit as foxhunting, smoking indoors and tutting at foreigners in the street, Jamie Oliver has strolled over to France to complain that British people would rather get bladdered on alcopops than enjoy a terrine of Fois Gras. Jamie told Paris Match magazine:

“People have huge TV sets - a lot bigger than mine - state-of-the-art mobile phones, cars and they get drunk in pubs at the weekend… their poverty shows in the way they feed themselves. I found the cooking of the inhabitants of the slums in Soweto a lot more diverse than ours… I think a lot of English people’s food lacks heart. It’s bland.”

Actually, we have to agree with Jamie Oliver here - the people of Soweto have every reason to be proud. True, they have to deal with the spread of AIDS, rampant crime and violence, a higher infant mortality rate and much lower life expectancy, but never let it be said that they can’t make a lovely sandwich.

However, we absolutely can’t let Jamie Oliver proceed with this awful campaign of his. If he had his way and Britain gave up its dependency on alcohol then there’d be no more Booze Britain-style TV shows. Imagine a world where you can’t spend 30 minutes watching grainy CCTV footage of screaming chavs bottling each other on a minor digital channel. Is that really a world you want to live in?