★★☆☆☆
Two Stars
To begin by explaining the concept, twenty-five cooks try to impress three judges with just one spoonful of the dish they have put their all into preparing. Each judge can choose just four cooks to join their kitchen and the rest go home. The judges will then go head-to-head in fierce competition.
The pilot episode of this new series opened like almost every other cooking show, with lots of intense music and shots of stressed hopefuls sweating over stoves. Once again we were presented with the idea that cooking is something incredibly dramatic, as contestants declared ‘my life is in this spoon’, tears were shed, and the judges became increasingly vitriolic towards one another. There was also the standard spate of innuendo that seems to accompany all food nowadays, as the beautiful Nigella Lawson, in typical fashion, described James from Shrewsbury’s dish as ‘instantly seductive’ and said ravenously, ‘I really want you’. Despite the initial sense of excitement, however, the show soon became quite repetitive as spoon after spoon was placed before the judges with little to maintain interest apart from the occasional amusing comment from the judges.
The combination of personalities on the judging panel was the same you might find on any reality TV show: the brutally honest, the eccentric, and the mother-figure. Predictably, Nigella couldn’t resist comforting the tearful eighteen-year-old, whilst Anthony Bourdain asserted that he needs to ‘toughen the f–k up’. Ludo Lefebvre, the surly Frenchman, provided the laughs with his occasional outbursts and indecipherable rants, but in general the show lacked the intensity of MasterChef, the light-heartedness of the Great British Bake-off, and the mouth-watering images of food we all love, leaving it awkwardly somewhere in the middle. Hopefully the next stage will be more engaging…
