By Sian Brewis

On Recession Bites, (BBC 2, 9pm) shouty chef Gregg Wallace, off Masterchef, was trying to find out what the credit crunch is doing to our food. Or, to be more accurate, WHAT IT WAS DAMN WELL PLAYING AT.

“I’m Gregg Wallace, an’ I WANNA KNOW how the downturn has changed the way we eat,” he announced, before heading off for a hugely enjoyable hectoring hour.

“Oi! Nah, not you! Her with the pram!” he yawps over a street as he talks to shoppers about their food spending.

It’s not a good time to be a chef. All the farmers’ markets are struggling, he’s told, while sales of pricey organic foods have plummeted. “The ’oneymoon’s over,” he reckons.

“WHY?” he yelled at one expert who is, you’ll notice, standing at least two feet away, presumably to weather the blast.

The poor, softly-spoken chap muses that supermarkets have spent millions on adverts.

“They’re convincing shoppers that they are sympathetic with them in these difficult times.”

Gregg’s amazed to find Waitrose offering up a bargain range. Supermarkets are making loads from the recession range. Sales are up 60% on last year.

Gregg gets a mum of two to try them. Nina, from Twickenham, is maybe not the typical buyer of Tesco Value stuff.

She doesn’t want to be a snob, she explains, but she doesn’t really want “value products” in her home. Some of it, though, turns out to be OK while other stuff is so foul she has to bin it. Tip: avoid the mince.

Then she’s sent off down the high street, where she finds it costs the same as the

supermarket.

“WHAT CAN INDEPENDENT SHOPS DO?” Gregg bellows to his expert, now four feet away. Encourage people to shop local, he says. Nothing new there then, but I bet they won’t.

Maybe if Gregg stood at the doorways of supermarkets, going, “OI! GET DOWN THE GROCERS”, it just might work.

The World’s Best Diet (ITV, 9pm) gets you losing loads of weight, get you thin, tones you up, makes you tired and depressed, and... oh.

Carole Malone may have lost the most weight on the LA Diet (an impressive 19lbs) but it seems the world’s best diet is not the greatest.

Turns out it’s only good for losing weight quickly (surely the point?) and it’s really the Italian diet is the winner.

Confused? I was, but then this two-part celebrity survey was conducted with all the depth of “now here’s the science bit” in a shampoo advert.

It’s not measuring the best diet, but whether the celeb likes the food. Linda Robson, who doesn’t like fish, was given a Japanese diet to try.

In Toyko, she was invited to dinner by a Japanese family. Guess what they served up?

She scrunched her face up, popped a morsel of fish in her mouth and promptly spat it out into her hand. No manners, some people.