Fish Fingers, Fantasy and a Chocolate Lift: The 2026 Imaginary Telly Menu Awards
Some telly food is designed to move the plot along. Some is designed to make you pause the programme, stare at the wall and wonder whether you could get away with custard for dinner. This is the second sort. Welcome to the 2026 Imaginary Telly Menu Awards, where we celebrate the fictional feasts of British telly and pair each one with a real UK snack that gets us part of the way there. The judging criteria are simple: craving factor, absurdity, and whether the snack pairing would survive a trip to the sofa. No actual chocolate lifts were harmed.
The rules of the imaginary menu
No restaurant has ever served these dishes exactly. That is the point. We are not here to fact-check recipes; we are here to honour the food that lives rent-free in our heads during the ad break. A fictional dish qualifies if it is impossible, impractical or simply too unsettling to order in public. The real snack must be available in a normal UK supermarket and not require a sous-chef.
6. Teletubbies' Tubby Custard — Best Pink Dessert With A Warning Label
Tubby Custard is less a dessert and more a substance that has achieved dessert status through sheer confidence. It glows. It is served in a bowl that looks like it could double as a space helmet. And yet, as a child, it seemed like the height of luxury. As an adult, it seems like something you would find in a lab fridge. Pair with Ambrosia Devon Custard pots, or a custard cream if you prefer your nostalgia biscuit-shaped. The real custard will not glow, which is probably for the best.
5. Red Dwarf's Space Curry — Best Meal For A Cargo Hold
Lister's curry is the fantasy of every person who has eaten a takeaway in a room they should probably clean. It is not so much the dish itself as the lifestyle: curry at midnight, no washing-up, and a talking hologram to judge you. Pair with a Pot Noodle Bombay Bad Boy or a supermarket chicken tikka ready meal. It scratches the same itch: hot, slightly excessive, and best eaten while pretending you are not making a mess.
4. Wallace & Gromit's Wensleydale — Best Cheese With A Plot Device
Wallace's love of Wensleydale is not fictional in the cheese sense, but the way he eats it — with crackers, in an armchair, while a penguin plots a crime — is pure fantasy. Pair with a wedge of real Wensleydale with cranberries and a packet of crackers. This is the posh end of the sofa snack spectrum: crumbly, sharp and capable of making you say 'cracking' in a Yorkshire accent you do not possess.
3. The IT Crowd's Chocolate Elevator — Best Confectionery Infrastructure
The chocolate elevator is the dream of every office worker who has ever looked at a lift and thought: could this be edible? It is not a snack; it is a building. That is why it ranks high. Pair with a bag of Cadbury Dairy Milk Buttons, because buttons are the closest legal approximation to pressing a chocolate floor. Do not attempt to install one at work. IT will not support it, and Facilities will send a passive-aggressive email.
2. Doctor Who's Fish Fingers And Custard — Best Flavour Crime Scene
The Eleventh Doctor's first meal is a national treasure. Fish fingers: fine. Custard: fine. Together: a diplomatic incident. Yet the combination has become a shorthand for comfort food with a side of chaos. Pair with Birds Eye fish fingers and a pot of Ambrosia custard. Dip cautiously. The first bite is confusing; the second is oddly compelling; the third is a personality change.
1. The 'I Wish That Was Real' Champion: A Perfect Sunday Roast From Any Soap Pub — Best Impossible Fantasy
Every soap has a pub that serves a roast that never seems to run out of Yorkshire puddings. The Queen Vic, The Rovers Return, The Woolpack — the names change, the gravy does not. This is the most appetising fantasy of all because it is almost real. Pair with a supermarket ready-made Sunday roast or, if you are feeling brave, a bag of roast chicken crisps and a gravy granule dissolved in hot water. It will not be the same. It will be enough.
The snack-testing verdict
The winners are not the most elaborate dishes. They are the ones that make the sofa feel like a place where impossible food might arrive. Fish fingers and custard wins because it is reachable. The chocolate elevator is a close second because it is not. And Tubby Custard remains the only dessert that could double as a nightlight. If you try any of these pairings, do it with a napkin and a sense of humour. Hunger TV Shop accepts no responsibility for custard-related identity crises.
