The Meat Market: Inside Smithfield Review by: David Butcher
Radiotimes BBC2, BBC HD 9:30pm - 10:30pm
Repeat: BBC HD Sat 2 Jun 10:05pm After last week’s portrait of Billingsgate, this week we’re at the meat market of Smithfield. Inspired documentary-maker Fergus O’Brien (who made The Armstrongs and Benefit Busters) lets his camera swoop and glide through the lovely hallways of the building while swing jazz lulls us into a sense of nostalgia and, er, big men with knives hack up carcasses.
It’s a wonderful, weird mix. Slowly, O’Brien ushers us into their world, and gets beneath the surface of the burly men in white aprons. Men like monolithic meat-cutter Biffo, who tells us he doesn’t enjoy Christmas so much now his mum has died, then reveals she died in 1975. We see 67-year-old butcher Norman start a fight with a customer, fists and all. And we see the treatment reserved for newcomers, women (there are hardly any) and “ethnics”. It’s a revealing, nuanced portrait of a fading world.
About this programme
The second documentary about London's key markets focuses on Smithfield. For decades it went unchallenged as the sole supplier of meat and poultry to the capital and with this monopoly it could play by its own rules. But times are tough - more supermarkets and butchers are buying directly from abattoirs, and the recession continues to grip. As veterans like salesmen Norman and Greg, and meat-cutter Biffo reminisce, the programme shows how this male-dominated world is changing, as represented by single mother Dee, the first woman to be employed as a meat cutter.
