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Review: Celebrity Masterchef

★★★☆☆

Three Stars

Masterchef is back again. It may be a revamped show, but it does feel like this new version has been going forever. Not much seems to have changed either. There’s the same dramatic music, the same dramatic voiceover, the same dramatic credit sequence. This time, though, John says “Cooking doesn’t get tougher than this!” in the intro. Greg just smiles and says “Hey, that’s my line!”. So, the same awkward banter then.

This time it’s the celebrity kind. The first week it’s all girls (Heidi Range, Jo Wood, Janet Street-Porter and Katy Brand) or, as Greg tends to call them, the “gehls”. Actually, he doesn’t say that in the first episode. In fact, he seems on the whole more reserved than in previous series. He’s a bit of a TV personality now, seen shouting for an hour in a BBC documentary recently, so maybe he’s worn himself out. He does claim at one point that he’d like to “munch the living daylights” out of a pudding if he were left alone with it, but you can tell he doesn’t really mean it. He’s just going through the motions for the cameras.

John also goes through the motions, those mainly being the motion of walking around the kitchen, peering at everyone. He can be a little leery at times. He likes to stand close to the contestants and watch them, smiling but not talking, like he’s just farted and he’s waiting for them to notice.

Janet looks at him like he has, snarling at his and Greg’s every comment. She doesn’t like being told what to do does Janet, not by John and Greg anyway. As she says, “I’ve edited a national newspaper, I can make a bread and butter pudding!” This seems like flawed logic to me. As John says, Heidi Range has played (in the Sugababes) in front of 90,000 people, but she’s still shaking when she tries to fillet fish. Still, she manages it, and pretty impressively too.

They all seem pretty good this time actually. None of them are disasters, no-one slices their finger off; they all just serve relatively good food. It’s a bit boring really. Masterchef is a bit boring when everyone’s just average, and the celebrities don’t add much.

It livens up a bit when they go into professional kitchens though, and everyone goes to pot. Heidi takes half an hour per plate and Katy keeps forgetting to put the cashews in her dish. Which is called Chicken Cashew. The only one who isn’t a nervous wreck is Janet. Perhaps she was on to something after all.

All in all, the show appears, like Greg, to be just going through the motions. There’s decent cooking, terrible jokes and fake tension throughout. When they cook for Cirque Du Soleil, we’re portentously told that if the food’s not good enough the performers will have to nip out for sandwiches, delaying the show and disappointing the 4,000 expectant audience members! So, more than just a few grumpy acrobats at stake.

Janet and Jo do unwittingly up the tension, though, when they pour an alcoholic liqueur over their fruit salad. Which they then serve to acrobats about to go and perform. Hmm. Jo does put brown sugar on it, though, which is hilarious. Because she used to be married to Ronnie Wood. You know, from the Rolling Stones. Who had a song called “Brown Sugar”.

Well, it’s still funnier than anything John and Greg say. Still, everything about this new series suggests that Masterchef will continue to be around for a long time yet. It can be a bit overblown and silly, but it’s still solid entertainment, and the cooking can be genuinely impressive. Though it’s a lot more fun when it isn’t.

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