They called him St Jamie. But it's gone way beyond that now. If by 2010 he is not also Lord Jamie, life peer and junior minister with responsibility for poor people's nosh at the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs then the new Jamie Oliver show will have failed.

There weren't a lot of recipes in it. He cooked some pancakes – egg, flour, milk - and showed some people who'd never cooked before how to do a spag bog with meatballs. But then Jamie's Ministry of Food wasn't really for you or me. It was aimed straight at government, and all the busybodies who moan at the public to eat better, but don't do much about making it happen beyond spending taxpayer's cash on advertising.

It's called, pointedly, Jamie's Ministry of Food, but it is really Kitchen Nightmares writ very large indeed because the challenge is every kitchen in Rotherham, a town of a quarter of a million souls. Jamie's subjects are people who have never cooked at all. Like Natasha, a mum on benefits with two kids. Her five-year-old Kaya's favourite supper is a takeaway doner kebab. "She's had two teeth out 'cause they've rotted," Natasha reports. So Jamie showed her how to cook a pancake.

This teeters close to being the nastiest sort of human zoo TV. See the woman who eats 12 packets of crisps a day (and, it was implied, nothing else)! You can hear the southern fairies (Jamie's self-description) chorusing: "Ohmigod, look at her, how stupid are they up there?" But Jamie battles this. He keeps telling us how "fucking angry" he is about the state of affairs in the "fattest region in England", and he convinces you that Britain's bad eating problem is a national scandal (see Felicity Lawrence in today's G2 on food, class and poverty). And that it isn't the Rotherhamites fault. Just.

You warm to him and his anger, though the analysis doesn't go much deeper than asking "why didn't they learn how to cook from their mums?" There is a yawning gap here. Where's the supermarkets' role in all this? 80% of food in Britain today comes from them, and you can bet that supermarket-pushed sugar-laden cereals and biscuits played their role in rotting Kaya's teeth. But Jamie got slapped on the wrist for criticising the Big Boxes when he did his nasty chickens show. Sainsbury's, with whom he has a relationship worth £1m a year, were not pleased and they told him so (you can watch his latest TV ad for Sainsbury's here).

Finally we get to the let's-roll-our-sleeves-up-and-sort-this-out bit, Jamie's New Big Idea. It's quixotic and inspiring. And according to the press reports (well, here's this from the Sun), it may be working. But from last night's first episode you cannot imagine Jamie's viral cooking lessons notion – whereby every newly trained family cook passes on their knowledge to four more, who in turn must pass it on to their own recruits - can ever take off. And what will the takeaways of Rotherham (presumably a fine and thriving industry) do if it does?

So far, we've only met one person in Rotherham who can turn on a stove. She is Julie Critchlow, the leader among the mothers caught by news cameras two years ago stuffing crisp packets and takeaway burgers through a Rotherham school fence to her children, starving under a new healthy-eating regime. At the time Jamie called her a "big old scrubber" but they make up. And it turns out she can roast pork belly, Chinese style. Hitched up, Jamie and Julie, are set to "completely change the face of eating, living and shopping in Rotherham." That you'd like to see.

Now can Word of Mouth please hear from the Rotherhamites who think that eating there has a grand face already. Or from those who not only know how to turn on the stove, but also how to make it sing (or at least produce a decent pot roast). Good luck to them. According to the Good Food Guide, there are some quite decent restaurants not far away in Sheffield.