Carnage – Swallowing the Past review: Simon Amstell fights the vegan corner in a witty mockumentary ★★★★ Simon Amstell pulls no punches in his pro-vegan mockumentary, playfully taking aim at politicians, celebrity chefs and the meat industry as […]

★★★★

Simon Amstell pulls no punches in his pro-vegan mockumentary, playfully taking aim at politicians, celebrity chefs and the meat industry as a whole.

Carnage – Swallowing the Past is set 50 years in the future. It’s a utopian paradise where humans and animals live in harmony and adolescents joyously trot around debating how best to cook an aubergine.

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The idea of consuming animal products is completely alien. So alien, in fact, that elders who lived in the carnivorous past are traumatised by their former meat-eating ways.

Sat in circles of chairs, pensioners pass around a beanbag and announce the name of a cheese that they used to eat in order to overcome their guilt. There is something hugely enjoyable about watching the veteran actress Gemma Jones painfully utter the word “Edam”.

This sets a bizarre tone, but a serious message is presented between the surreal moments.

TV chefs vilified

Amstell himself narrates Carnage, presenting it as a taboo-breaking project that attempts to normalise this meat-eating past.

This mockumentary setup humourously underlines the strangeness of how food has been marketed to us.

By taking cooking shows out of context, Amstell vilifies a number of famous chefs, most notably Fanny Craddock.

“Fanny Craddock filled the Royal Albert Hall with her performance of cutting a dead pig in half and putting it on a big plate,” he says.

None of Nigella Lawson, Gordon Ramsay, Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall emerge unscathed either.

One talking head also notes the sexualisation of dairy products, citing a yoghurt-eating Nicole Scherzinger saying “Yes baby, yes!”

Food for thought

Amstell’s tongue is never far from his cheek throughout Carnage.

But between archive footage of Gordon Ramsay encouraging people to raise their own sheep and Ed Miliband eating a bacon sandwich, the former Never Mind the Buzzcocks host does highlight some of the unsavoury practices involved in the dairy and meat industry, including footage of animal slaughter, artificial insemination and factory farms.

Despite being a mockumentary, the film deals in facts, underlining the devastating harm that all of this is doing to the environment.

Amstell, meanwhile, jokingly plays up to being bemused at the fact that humankind didn’t simply switch to a plant-based diet.

Though the film loses its way slightly towards the end as it parodies the downfall of humans and the rise of veganism, it does serve up an amusing satire of the public appetite for meat.

With Carnage, Amstell wittily fights the corner of the vegan – so often the butt-of-the-joke elsewhere.

Carnage is available to watch on the iPlayer from Sunday (19 March)