Hairy Dieters: How to Love Food and Still Lose Weight, BBC One

What do you do after nine series celebrating the cooking and eating of food? You make another, charting the effort to lose some of the weight gained. This time out, the bike-riding Si King and David Myers are still eating and travelling, but trying to adjust what they put in their mouths, to make it less calorie-tastic. Some exercise was on the menu too. As was selling copies of the tie-in book.

King and Myers are agreeable enough in small doses – and ought to know how to be after their careers in TV and film production which preceded their transformation into the Hairy Bikers. Their banter is perfected, their adopted personas a snug fit. But on the evidence of episode one of Hairy Dieters, the content was spread too thin in this soufflé-light hour. The constant repetition of their mission (the programme's title) was unnecessary. We got it. OK? They only made one low calorie dish, and that was in the last 20 minutes. Their continual surprise at learning, yet again, that they looked and were obese didn’t ring true. However, cousin Muriel pointing out to the crestfallen duo that “you look fat, both of you” was damn funny. Seconds of her hot pot were refused.

A male with a more than a 37-inch waist puts their health at risk. King’s was 49

Despite the jocularity and increasingly faux-seeming matiness of the pair, there was a serious core to Hairy Dieters. Never more so than when King relived the appalling treatment he was singled out for (in tremendously difficult circumstances) while at primary school for being an overweight kid. It still affected him, and amounted to bullying and led to more bullying. Both King and Myers revealed they were on blood pressure medication.

NHS guidelines were quoted. A male with a plus 37-inch waist measurement puts their health at risk. King’s was 49 inches. At their heights, each should weigh no more than 13-and-a-half stone. King weighed 19, Myers almost 18. Their knees ache from carrying the excess. Even though the pair met medical professionals, the actual damage caused by obesity was not outlined. A strange omission. We can take the bad news, you know.

More egregious was their visit to an exercise class. That in itself was fine, but the duo named a series of commercial operators of such programmes. Don’t local communities and volunteers have such schemes? Presenting the profit-making in this context was remiss.

Myers put the start of his weight gain down to curry and beer at college

Ultimately though, this was education cloaked as light entertainment and aimed at men in denial. Points were made. Fat was cut off pork before cooking. Frying without fat was shown to be a good thing. King and Myers recognised that their habit of eating titbits while cooking wasn’t great. Only one dish was prepared, towards the end of the programme: a lower-calorie version of the lasagne that they would normally make. They corralled a group of people to help them on their journey towards a less-bulky self, and good luck to them.

Hairy Dieters arrives on screens soon after the Jacques Peretti series The Men Who Made us Fat. In King and Myers’s case, there was little attempt to examine outside factors which may have led to their weight gain. Myers put it down to experiencing curry and beer when he went to college and declared of hot pot that “I’m not prepared to give this up, and don’t see why I should”. It was accepted that you cleared your plate, however much might be on it. Their goal was to modify what they eat, rather than adopt an entirely new style of diet. Or indeed, actually diet in the traditional sense at all.