Tonight: The Obesity Timebomb (2012)

TV review by Ben Lammas: “I could buy a salad for £3, but for that price I could have had three chicken burgers.” The opening line from 18-stone teenager Charlotte Hill said it all.

Get as much instant gratification as you can for as little cash as possible – and to hell with the consequences.

Yet the consequences are dire, as the experts lined up to tell us in last night’s ITV documentary. For many Brits hooked on a diet of fat, fat and more fat, the future is bleak.

Doctors like Arun Gosh and David Ashton warned reporter Fiona Foster that, without curbing their doomed habits, many face spending their days wheezing back and forth to their local GP with diet-induced ailments like diabetes and heart disease, draining NHS resources before collapsing in an early death.

This half-hour programme was hardly shocking. You only have to nip down the High Street to notice that there is a little less room on the pavement these days, as the nation swells in size.

And it is not as if Jamie Oliver hasn’t already given us sound warning. But it is still worth taking note, and is certainly a worthy subject to be hitting the TV screens, given what is an undeniable problem.

In a few years time, the average male will weigh 17-stone we were told last night, while faced with an all-too visual example of a tubby chap’s belly hanging over his belt.

An average woman will weigh 14-stone. It starts to get your mind racing about the knock-on-effects if all this proves to be true.

Air travel, for one, is going to become a lot riskier – beware low-flying planes, not to mention larger passengers trying to shoe-horn themselves into economy seats.

Nightclubs will probably all shut down in favour of a night-out at the kebab shop – all that dancing being a bit too strenuous – while horse-riding will surely be banned on animal cruelty grounds.

Joking aside, it was actually terrible to see 17-year-old Charlotte Hill sob her way to the theatre for gastric band surgery to stop her ballooning weight. “Temptation is everywhere,” she said.

The programme also stopped off on our doorstep in the West Midlands, visiting Birmingham Heartlands where health chiefs have had to fork out on reinforced beds and chairs as patients become as big as those like Pargat Chand, now 40-stone.

“This is more like Birmingham Alabama than Birmingham West Midlands,” said tiny Fiona, on learning of the hospital’s dilemma.

She also dropped in on Moorcroft Wood Primary School in Wolverhampton where headteacher Andy Nicholls explained the efforts they are going to in order to encourage children into eating fruit and veg.

And you are left having to concur, that encouragement to eat good food at home and at school is the only thing that can defuse the “obesity timebomb” . . . even if it does mean agreeing with Jamie Oliver in the end.