In February, Channel 4 aired The Fried Chicken Shop, a one-off documentary set in a London fried chicken shop. Using the same fixed-rig setup that the channel loves to return to again and again, The Fried Chicken Shop took a week's worth of footage from Clapham's Roosters Spot eatery and distilled it into a tightly packed hour of entertainment. And it was much more fun than it had any right to be.
This week, Channel 4 announced that The Fried Chicken Shop is to return for three episodes that will repeat and expand on the premise of the original. We will still see the Roosters Spot staff grind out one impossibly long shift after another. We will still see Clapham's finest slumped over the counter at chucking-out time, manfully attempting to order a Mega Mix chicken burger with their last remaining molecule of dignity intact. But this time, we are promised, we will also get to follow some of the takeaway customers home. This new addition will almost certainly contain the most exciting footage of a lonely man sitting on a carpet in a bedsit and silently eating chips at 2am that British television has ever seen.
The beauty of The Fried Chicken Shop is its universality. You might watch 24 Hours in A&E and feel admiration for the medical staff and their ability to maintain composure under extraordinary pressure. You might watch The Hotel and wonder why any of the guests agreed to let cameras into their rooms. But to watch The Fried Chicken Shop is to recognise a part of yourself.
Plenty of us, at one point or another, have bought fast food while drunk. Many of us will have done so without a second thought for the staff behind the counter. What The Fried Chicken Shop did so well was to make it clear how awful we probably are when we do this. Judging by the show, the staff of Roosters Spot have put up with it all: aggressive drunks; attention-seeking drunks; people pretending to be disabled; drug dealers handing out business cards; and social media hipster dullards, who function as an argument for sawing a circle around the edge of London and letting it drop into the sea.
Watching the staff remain as good-natured and professional as they were in the face of such soul-sapping arsery was a joy. It was as heartwarming as anything else I have seen on television this year. And although it had the potential to lapse into the uncomfortably sneery classism that Channel 4's Gypsy programmes sometimes revel in, The Fried Chicken Shop staunchly refused to judge anyone. It didn't have a point to make, or an issue to force home, other than the awkward "Wow, don't people eat a lot of chicken these days?" message tacked on to the start. It was happy enough just to show us the chicken shop and let us reach our own conclusions. The first episode was magnificent. I can't wait to hang out there again.
