With his Food Revolution sidelined in US schedules, the chef makes a return to his culinary roots in Jamie's Great Britain

He fell short in the admittedly herculean task of converting 300 million Americans to healthy eating, so perhaps it's no surprise that Jamie Oliver's next project is both more modest and safely within his culinary comfort zone: a celebration of traditional British pub-style food.

The announcement of the TV chef's next outing – a six-part Channel 4 series and accompanying book – comes just three weeks after the latest series of his Food Revolution programme was moved to a different time slot after poor US ratings.

More humiliating still was that the ABC network replaced it with reruns of the US equivalent of Strictly Come Dancing.

Now, having dressed as a root vegetable to persuade sceptical US children that their dietary options extend beyond pizza, Oliver has decided to return to his roots with Jamie's Great Britain, focusing on recipes such as steak and kidney pudding and fish and chips, as well as the overseas dishes Britons love.

Oliver's return follows a sequence of foreign-based shows, including his US efforts and tours around Europe for the Jamie Does … series. "It has been a long time coming, but sometimes it takes a few decades of looking at other countries to realise how wonderful your own really is," he said as he promoted a book accompanying the series.

The first series of Food Revolution – set in a West Virginia town identified as America's fattest – disarmed the understandable hostility of locals told by an unknown, chirpy Englishman that they were killing their children with starch and grease. The programme even bagged an Emmy for best reality show but lost momentum, and viewers, when it relocated to Los Angeles for a second outing.

For the 35-year-old chef – who cares deeply about his US and UK school meal projects – such setbacks are cushioned by enormous domestic popularity and a fortune estimated to be above £100m.

Between series of Food Revolution, Oliver filmed his popular 30-Minute Meals programmes for Channel 4, aimed at tempting time-pressed Britons back into the kitchen. This it seemingly did, in vast numbers: the accompanying book became the UK's fastest selling nonfiction title of all time, spending six months heading the sales charts.

Jamie's Great Britain will contain nods towards Oliver's first culinary experience, at his parents' Essex pub. As well as giving the chef's perhaps inevitable "twist" on traditional recipes, Jamie's Great Britain also promises to tell the stories behind the dishes.

Dominique Walker of Channel 4 said: "In this new series we see him travelling across Britain to discover the fascinating stories of how our own food, the dishes we think of as traditionally British, are actually a product of the rich melting pot of cultures that have made our country what it is today."

• This article was amended on 26 May 2011. Owing to an editing change, this article originally said that series two of Food Revolution had been dropped from US schedules. This has been corrected.

 

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BBC to launch controversial bomb disposal unit comedy

BBC will risk controversy with the release of a new comedy about bomb-disposal units based in Afghanistan and Iraq where hundreds of lives have been lost tackling explosives.
The contentious series will be screened on BB3, which is directed to a younger audience.
The announcement of the pilot for the show comes as the body of the latest death from an improvised explosive device (IED), Colour Serjeant Kevin Fortuna, from 1st Battalion The Rifles, is repatriated today.
He died on Monday on patrol in Helmand.
The BBC said: "It's a show about something the public easily forget: soldiers really enjoy being soldiers.
"This sitcom shows us why, as it takes the audience from moments of intense action to the fractious camaraderie as the unit waits around for their next tasking."
The dangers faced by bomb disposal units in the middle east was tackled in the Oscar-winning film The Hurt Locker in 2009.
Comedy has been used in the past to document warfare including the TV series M*A*S*H, which was based on the Korean War.
But the series may come under fire from critics as more than two-thirds of the deaths of coalition troops in Afghanistan since the conflict began in 2001 have been due to IEDs.
BBC3's show is part of a new season of shows on the channel which was announced today.
They include Britain You're Welcome to It, which will look at the country through the eyes of east European immigrants to examine their perceptions.
And in Up For Hire Live, BBC3 will look at youth unemployment with a week-long live series of shows in which talented jobless young people are put in the position of making executive decisions.
Another comedy pilot is Eggbox, about life on a teenage cancer ward. It has been co-written by Tom Bidwell, who was behind the Oscar-nominated short film Wish 143, about a teenager with cancer who wants to lose his virginity before he dies.
Sharon Horgan, best known for her near-the-knuckle comedy Pulling, will return with her new comedy Life Story about a woman who is wrongly imprisoned for murder.

 

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Slain al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden had prepared a blueprint how to assassinate US President Barack Obama

Slain al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden had prepared a blueprint how to assassinate US President Barack Obama and disrupt the 2012 American elections, media reports have said.

US officials analysing the data found in bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad during the raid that killed him found a diary in which the terror leader had jotted his musings on how to kill the US President, ABC News reported.

London-based Sunday Times also had a similar report. Osama "jotted his musings" in a diary "on how to kill President Barack Obama, but not Joe Biden, the vice-president, who, he wrote, was not worth the trouble," The Times said.

"I think what this new information indicates is that he was more involved than people realise," said Steve Jones, an analyst with RAND Corp.

US agents have had their first access to bin Laden's three wives, but reportedly they were not cooperative and hostile.

President Obama has acknowledged that threats against his own grandmother from another al Qaeda group are being closely monitored along with threats to American citizens, according to ABC News.

In the journals discovered at his compound, bin Laden urged his followers to assassinate President Obama and disrupt the 2012 American elections.

ABC News consultant and former FBI profiler Brad Garrett said bin Laden's quest to kill the President is a personal one.

"The president obviously has a Muslim history. He's not following bin Laden's philosophy of what a true Islamist should be doing," Garrett said.

"He is incensed, inflamed, obsessed about killing the President," Garrett told ABC News.

An attack on as high-profile a target as the US President would demonstrate al Qaeda's reach. "The ultimate goal in killing or cutting down the United States would be to take out its president," Garrett said.

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TWO imams at South Florida mosques are among six people indicted on federal charges of providing financial support and encouraging violence by the Pakistani Taliban.

The indictment charged Hafiz Muhammed Sher Ali Khan, 76, the imam at the Miami Mosque.

The indictment also charged two of the imam's sons. All three men are American citizens who are originally from Pakistan.


The four-count indictment charges the Khans and three others living in Pakistan with conspiring to provide material support to a conspiracy to murder, maim and kidnap people overseas, as well as conspiring to provide about $45,000 in financial support to the Pakistani Taliban from 2008 to 2010.

Each of the four counts in the indictment carries a maximum 15-year prison term. Prosecutors said the indictment did not charge the mosques. They added that the defendants were charged ''based on their provision of material support to terrorism, not on their religious beliefs or teachings''.

The charges of supporting the Pakistani Taliban but not actually carrying out operations are the most common types of terrorism prosecutions the US has pursued.

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