Friday, December the 14th, 2007
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Use Your Loaf is an exciting new panel game in which contestants are challenged to recreate the feeding of the five thousand. Those of you who have read your Bible will be familiar with the story. Having gathered five thousand men, and an unspecified number of women and children, in some wild and remote backwater, the Christ manages to eke a slap-up lunch for the lot of them from five loaves of bread and two fish, also unspecified. On the face of it, this seems unlikely, and one suspects either charlatanry or perhaps defective memory on the part of the chroniclers who recorded the event. But the game is about wholesome family teatime entertainment , not theology, so a pox upon those who get into a skeptical flap, say I.
Incidentally, I use the term “the Christ” because this is now the accepted way of referring to the beardy preacher man following Melvin Gibson's motion picture The Passion Of The Christ, also a piece of wholesome family teatime entertainment, with added homoerotic violence.
Although lacking in homoerotic violence, Use Your Loaf is nevertheless an energetic and quite dangerous game in which blood is often spilled. Each member of the panel is given a bread bin containing five baps, and a tray with a couple of fish on it. For health and safety reasons, the fish are not actual fish, but replica blennies made of marzipan. Contestants must then answer a series of bap- and blenny-related questions to win either a reasonably sharp kitchen knife, a pair of pinking shears, a huge and lethal slicing machine, or a fretsaw. When the tools have been allocated, the panel members—usually consisting of Stephen Fry and Stephen Fry's friends—are given ten minutes to cut up their bread and fish into as many pieces as possible. After the advert break, in which celebrity beauty editor Nadine Baggott extols either pentapeptides or smokers' poptarts, a lovely and arithmetically competent assistant counts up each contestant's bap and blenny bits. The winner is, of course, the one who achieves a score as close to five thousand as possible.
Use Your Loaf is shown on The Bread And Fish Programmes Channel every weekday at teatime.