A dream school dinner of egg and Glee

WHILE it is mildly heartwarming to see celebrities using their bloated heads to put the world to rights or plug the hole in the ozone layer, it’s even more fun to watch them fail miserably in their efforts and blub like babies.

That’s why Jamie’s Dream School on Channel 4, tomorrow at 9pm, has got to be worth watching.

Its highly spurious set-up sees chef Jamie Oliver turn his back on doing something he knows anything about to corral a group of yoofs, who, like him, struggled with their studies, and have them taught by celebrity braniacs in the hope of convincing them to return to school.

At first read it sounds like an excruciating hour of watching the “pukka” crusader for healthy school meals continue his eye-rolling quest to expunge Britain’s educational centres of fatties, but on closer inspection it is closer to I’m A Celebrity... than Jamie Oliver’s School Dinners.

With historian David Starkey being threatened with violence by a 15-year-old and scientist Robert Winston shocking pupils with a group rat dissection, Dream School is intriguing not because of its good intentions but because of the promise of watching celebrities flapping in a sea of humiliation, struggling to keep their heads above the water.

One British institution who wasn’t available to impart his extensive knowledge on the UK’s Neets is David Attenborough.

But that’s probably because he’s been busy lugging an enormous 1,000-year-old egg around the world.

The imaginatively titled Attenborough and the Giant Egg, tomorrow on BBC2 at 8pm, sees the naturalist return to Madagascar, where, while filming in 1960, he was given pieces of an egg belonging to the largest bird to have ever lived — the extinct elephant bird.

While the programme is built upon the premise of Attenborough investigating the fate of the long-lost feathery fiend — which was something like a giant ostrich, weighing half a ton — it seems to be mainly an excuse for him to highlight the environmental devastation wreaked upon the island over the past 50 years.

Expect gratuitous shots of lemurs leaping through the forest and Dave’s head occasionally being eclipsed by a massive egg which would make the Easter bunny wet his breeches in, er, egg-citement.

If the thought of cooking an omlette big enough to muffle the sound of Jamie Oliver’s incessant preaching doesn’t wet your whistle, Monday’s episode of Glee on E4 at 9pm is a safe bet.

It’s sectionals time again and New Directions take on the Warblers.

Hmmm, I wonder how many times they will have to go through this to keep the show going for a few more series?

Follow Matthew Jenkin on Twitter @matthewjenkin