How to turn up tasty leftovers into a delicious full meal, with Colin the emotionally unstable chef

IT’S easy to rustle up a delicious meal from leftovers, claims every TV chef. Because they have to, it’s like doing community service for them. I’ve done the real thing.

But are they lying, and you’ll waste hours making horrible crap from slightly off meat that gives you a twitchy arse? Let’s see.

Lamb tagine

This North African dish is the classic way to turn leftover lamb into a tangy stew with apricots and cinnamon, apparently. They don’t mention all the good bits of meat will be gone, so it’s more accurately gristly bits tagine. No-one fancies a nice bit of cartilage in watery apricot jam.

Turkey curry

So I created a careful blend of turmeric, cumin, Kashmiri chillies and six other spices and used free-range turkey, and guess what? It took me two fucking days and it’s curry made with dry, nasty turkey. You know what I’d like to do with those ground Kashmiri chillies, Ramsey, Slater and Lawson? That’s right. Your arses.

Leftover baked beans shepherd’s pie

They’re just taking the piss now. Shepherd’s pie with baked beans slopped in. Still, I bet Marco Pierre White would say it was manna from heaven if Knorr paid him enough, the fucking whore. Why haven’t I got an advertising deal like him? I’ll do anything. I’ll make them eat dog shit with a stock cube in it.

Marmalade and whisky bread-and-butter pudding

Bung stale bread in a bowl with milk and sugar and ponce it up with some whisky. Shit if you ask me. Maybe it’d help if I was from the rationing generation who were just ecstatically happy not to have been blown to pieces by the Luftwaffe, and hadn’t drunk the whisky from the bottle.

Bubble-and-squeak

Jamie Oliver always dredges this one up, probably because it sounds a bit cockney. Who’d have thought you could fry up some mushed-up potatoes with sprouts or whatever? Fat-tongued twat. That’s why he’s banging a former model and I know the shift patterns of girls on Babestation.

Fridge-raid soup

Basically whatever’s been hanging around your fridge – courgettes, carrots, olives, cheese, parsley. So bland you’ll be tempted to chuck the fridge thermometer in for a bit of crunch and to find out what mercury tastes like.

Creamy leftover prawn pasta

I had to question whether several-days-old seafood was the ideal thing to reheat. But I did it. Simply cook linguine as normal, ignoring odour, and add cream, finely chopped red chillies, fresh herbs and the prawns with shavings of parmigiano reggiano. Now all you have to do is tuck in and start shitting like Trafalgar Square’s fountain.

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Channel 4's 40-year odyssey of filth, violence and deviant sex is over. We will never recover

By Abigail Pennson, our reasonable, plain-speaking middle-class columnist slightly to the right of Hitler

IF ONLY we could go back. To who we were before the black tentacles of sexual perversion reached out from our television screens. To before Channel 4.

To before 4.45pm on November 2nd, 1982, when a devil wearing a Richard Whiteley mask tempted us, with beguiling letters and numbers, into a hell of depravity.

Channel 4’s charter was to destroy every moral, every scruple, everything decent about our country. No serious commentator can suggest otherwise. Its 40-year mission to create a nation of filthy wanking bastards is complete.

The Conservatives are doing the right thing by selling it. Too little and too late. No mere multi-million pound boost to the Treasury can restore our innocence.

The innocence of a child, lost to the paedophile extravaganza of Mini-Pops. The innocence of a curious teenager tempted by the Red Triangle, lost to explicit 1970s Japanese cinema.

The innocence of a soap opera about murders, cults, bombings and plague, lost to a pre-watershed lesbian kiss that turned an estimated two million women gay, with many of them unable to turn back.

Remember our lives before then? Before The Word corrupted a generation into coke-snorting faux-Northerners bathing in maggots? Before The Big Breakfast made 7am testicular exposure commonplace? Before Hollyoaks Late Night invented male rape?

Before series seven of Big Brother, when the freakshow of regional accents turned to live 24-hour cannibalism? Before Brass Eye killed Princess Margaret as a ‘stunt’?

Or even the present day, when Naked Attraction is inescapable? When every night genitals parade before us in the name of entertainment, pierced, multi-gender and often with as many as three dicks per man?

We can never go back. We are a nation of depraved, deviant pigs, wallowing in our own filth, begging for one more episode of Eurotrash. I haven’t had sex since 1987 without climaxing at the thought of Jools Holland saying ‘groovy fuckers’ on The Tube.

But for a new generation, there is hope. That private ownership will turn this around. That Channel 4 can become as edifying and educational as its unfettered neighbour, Channel 5.

It’s too late for me. I’m drowning in metaphorical effluent and can’t wait for the next Open House: The Great Sex Experiment. You must save yourselves.

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