Jamie takes to the mountains for a pitch-fork bbq Channel 4

YOU HAVE to like Jamie Oliver. OK, no, you don’t. But you do have to admire him. Just a little.

He’s always trying new things, never resting on his laurels, and often telling fat people not to eat that. It should make him look like a twit, but never really does. He makes things work that shouldn’t.

Take tonight – the second episode of his American road trip, which doesn’t work at all, yet is still very watchable. He’s off to live with the cowboys, eat their food, cook for them… you get the idea.

You can’t help feel he’s a bit overly shocked at even the most well-titled feasts. He’s going to a bar, he tells us, for a pitchfork barbecue. Yet when he ­arrives, he exclaims: “Are you having a laugh? Why have you got meat hanging on a pitchfork?” What did he ­expect, you wonder, from a “pitchfork barbecue”? Of course, this is classic Oliver: dramatic over-exclamation of UNEXCITING things to make them seem EXCITING! Often it works. Occasionally it makes him look like he’s had a stroke.

It’s an especially impressive act tonight as he’s clearly bored off his t*ts. All the cowboys eat is steak. Just steak, hold the veg. And the pots. And the forks too. Salt? That’s for pussies. Pussies with their needy taste buds.

Jamie is a man, remember, who can’t walk past a vegetable patch without wanting to massage oil into something or make love to a squash.

And yet, with a heroic ­effort, he manages to say at one point: “And you never season this. Interesting,” as if he’s not dying inside. Never mind the rough, tough cattlemen and rodeo riders with faces of leather, Jamie is the real hero here. He’s out on his own, in the wild, without his oregano.

Put another way: when one of Jamie’s patented ­recipes is baked beans, you know you’re in trouble.

As a rule, these TV quests allow for about 40 per cent misery for the host. Any more and it actually gets miserable for us, too. I’d say Jamie experiences about 90 per cent ­misery here. That’s enough to make Ronnie Corbett top himself. It rains constantly, it’s freezing, he’s forced to eat cow b*llocks (unseasoned cow b*llocks), and his cowboy mentor, Hip, confiscates his asparagus. The latter, you feel, puts him at breaking point.

“It’s a miserable day again,” he says. “It’s so depressing. Rain makes everything miserable. I get the feeling that food for cowboys is just fuel.”

Yet, amazingly, that’s the only moment of self-pity. The rest of the misery is Jamie ­being Jamie, playing along – wow, look, you have no teeth, amazing! I’ll slow cook the meat – and bringing it back down to the required 40 per cent misery limit.

You see what a hero he is? He’s suffering so we don’t have to. Someone give the man a medal. And some salted asparagus.