With the recent arrest and incarceration of a few supermarket skippers in North London on highly immoral charges, maybe it’s time for a new Channel 4 game show.
Series producer of Supermarket Skip Sweep, Bill Tandoori, explained how the show works in this week’s TV Times: “It’s quite simple. Contestants dressed in black outfits including balaclavas are air dropped into the vicinity of a major supermarket. They are not given night vision goggles, and they have to navigate the barbed wire high walls round the back of the supermarket in complete darkness without being stopped by the police patrols, search lights and helicopter surveillance teams looking for skippers/freegans. Once in, they have to fill their bags with as much binned perfectly edible supermarket food which would have been dumped anyway, and flee the area getting to a checkpoint designated on a GPS system. If they get there without being spotted by the cops, or ripped to shreds by police attack dogs then they get to have a meal that night. If they get caught, they not only don’t get to eat but are disgracefully peddled through the courts on some outdated 19th century law causing untold distress to the skipper and cost to the taxpayer.”
Supermarket Skip Sweep will air in March and will only be available to watch if viewers can get a log in code from a heavily fortified supermarket skip at designated locations around the country.
Key Facts: In the UK 25 million tonnes of food goes into British landfill sites every year of which 15 million tonnes of this food is perfectly good to eat. If sold, this food would have a value of around £25 billion. The supermarkets call this a “surplus”, meanwhile 12 million people in the UK can’t afford to buy healthy food as poverty levels are rising daily. Citing cost efficiency, supermarkets prefer to throw away edible food that is approaching its sell-by date rather than mark it down in price as the cost of paying staff is greater than the money made on the reduced items.
