TAKE a generous chunk of tongue, a hefty serving of cheek and mix with a super-sized dollop of American pie and, hey presto – you have the perfect recipe for the latest Jamie Oliver holiday series, I mean cookery series, Jamie’s Food Revolution Hits Hollywood (Tuesday C4, 10pm).

Yes, the titanic-tongued geezer with the freezer is back on our screens in yet another attempt to convert your average American school kid from food slob to food snob.

This time his sights are set on the weird and wonderful residents of Los Angeles, specifically Hollywood, and while his heart’s in the right place (sautéed with chanterelle mushrooms and served on a bed of celeriac champ), you can’t help but feel that he’s on to a loser this time.

He’s trying to preach to families programmed to believe that a sugar-frosted mega-muffin counts as part of their five-a-day, provided it has a glace cherry on top, and to parents who know their children would prefer to eat a Krispie-Kreme doughnut over natural yoghurt with honey and fruit.

They shop at supermarkets where even products as simple and basic as cheese are rendered lethal. Entire walls are dedicated to the stuff, yet there’s no room for a single truckle of cheddar or round of brie – only bags of sweating, fluorescent yellow and orange matter that has been pre-sliced, salted, sugared, grated, chopped, cubed and processed to within an inch of its sorry life.

While in Florida once I bought an aerosol can called Eezee-Cheez – For Portable Snacking because I knew nobody back here would believe such a thing could exist outside of a Star Trek film.

That’s what Oliver is up against. He is no doubt full of good intentions, but he’s just not one of them and they don’t know what to make of him.

Essentially to these guys he is that English dude who preaches to folks about how unhealthy the food they’re eating is, while looking about as healthy himself as a lad on a minibus home after a weekend stag-do in Blackpool.

Then you’ve got the whole revolution theme – not something your everyday American is overly keen on. It reminds them of “Commmies”, you see, and riots and un-American activities.

So while the retro Russian-theme, with the Communist Party-style poster complete with giant fist punching out of it, may have seemed like a very cool thing in the artist’s studio in London, in the stark light of a rented Hollywood hall, with its own Jamie “war room”, it looked antagonistic and contrived.

This got the local authorities rattled from the start, resulting in him and his crew being banned from all the schools in the hood. Not an ideal start, seeing as it’s school dinners he’s trying to revolutionise.

Undeterred, he attempted to shake them and shock them into action, using his usual repertoire of tricks such as piles of lard on a table to show how much a kid’s bum weighs, a school bus full of sugar to illustrate how much of the evil white stuff is being secretly stuffed inside their children via flavoured milk (a school meal staple, sponsored by the US equivalent of the milk marketing board). Only a handful of locals turned up and gave a fig. Come to think of it, only a handful of them would know what a fig was.

So next he went to “save” Patra’s, one of LA’s most iconic and popular burger joints, famous for serving up artery-clogging lumps of minced animal in buns of various guises, washed down with milkshakes made from hugely calorific scoops of ice cream flavoured with industrial-strength, sugar-laden fruit syrups.

Jamie’s suggestion that the owner, Dino, whose dad Demitrios started the family diner back in the 1970s, might try swapping the unspecified but cheap meat he had been buying from the same guy for 40 years for some good quality ranch beef, three times the price went down like a bucket of cold sick.

His other idea that Dino should ditch the syrup and ice cream and give his customers shakes made with real fruit and yoghurt was met with utter refusal.

Dino explained that he knew what Jamie was saying, adding that he would not give the stuff he serves up daily to customers to his own children.

“So don’t you think you should treat your customers like they’re your kids?” asked the matey messiah.

“No,” said Dino, loading another glass full of ticking time-bomb surprise.

Compared to his previous American adventure, Oliver seemed noticeably more sensitive, more stressed and more anxious.

By the end of this first epis- ode he appeared depressed, petted of lip and close to throwing in the tea-towel.

Perhaps he was beginning to regret wheeling out that live cow...but enough about his missus.

Joke! Just a joke!