Pretty and palatable, but where’s the passion?

There’s always the chance you’ll stick your head out the door and find the world has gone weird on you.

Just now I’m addicted to MasterChef Australia, a soap opera with food.

This strains the patience of my family, but it will all be over at the end of the week, when one of the final six competitors will win.

I’ll be sorry to see the last of Creaky Voice Girl, whose food presentation is as astounding as her mastery of that voice, a weirdly fashionable vocal style among some young women whose every utterance passes painfully through a nutmeg grater in their throat.

I worry for Creaky Voice Girl that one day she’ll lose her nutmeg grater altogether.

I worry for Little Blonde that she’ll be next to leave, though her lurid pink macaroons saved her from oblivion last weekend.

I worry for Sarah, the woman who loves cooking pork, and caresses it lovingly the way Nigella used to caress food, that she’ll fail again over her desserts.

She’s my favourite. That’s why I remember her name.

I remind myself, not in a good way, of my grandmother’s long-ago love for Roger Gascoigne, a TV personality who used to wink at old ladies like her, sending them into paroxysms of lonely delight.

I used to laugh at her. Be careful what you laugh at.

I like food, I like to cook, but this show is mostly about the kind of food you taste rather than devour.

It’s not family food. They won’t thank you for a witty liquorice sauce with pickled pineapple, and I wouldn’t thank myself.

But that’s the kind of thing you can be trapped with in an illchosen restaurant if you don’t watch out.

Like most food on this show, their menus are designed for the jaded appetites of people who want a strawberry to be more like a mushroom. It’s for food roues sated with tastebud excess.

I wouldn’t thank you for animal’s innards three ways, or beetroot-cured trout, or goat’s cheese with lurid macaroons, or strawberries with tarragon, some of which were on MasterChef last Saturday night.

Adventure in this context is for skinny girls who toy with things on their plate, then rush off to throw up in the loo.

And don’t get me started on gluten-free.

They’ve even written that on a cornflakes packet now.

Am I right here? Aren’t cornflakes made from corn, which is not wheat, so has no gluten in it, or have they been wheatflakes all along?

I once ate in a three-star Michelin restaurant, in Japan, where the food tasted of itself in exquisite ways. It was delicious because it was the perfect manifestation of, say, wagyu steak, so mottled with fat that it’s as pink as baby veal, and which, barbecued, melts in your mouth like warm caramel.

Nothing beats simplicity. Food, like sex, doesn’t need bells and whistles. Or so I like to think.

That’s why I can’t be bothered with the TV series that everyone out there weirdly adores just now.

If you can’t establish a lead character without making me watch two sequences of him watching porn that I have to watch too, within a few long minutes, you’re not building a character. You haven’t got one.

You’ve just got some jerk who watches porn, a poor substitute for a personality, which moreover involves a woman being treated like a sex doll by a guy with his trousers off.

Porn is boring. And mechanical. And – actually – joyless, so I won’t be watching, which doesn’t matter except that kids seeing these weary moves could think that’s all there is to look forward to. Which is sad.

You will gather, then, that I’m cheering the latest scandal at the Fox Network.

I loathe Fox and all it stands for, which includes the way it’s welleducated anchor women are made to wear silly short skirts and flash their legs while they do their job.

It should be no surprise that the elderly boss of the channel and its star broadcaster were finally disgraced for seedy sexist behaviour, and now another male there has been accused.

The place was run like a sinister Man Magazine from the 1950s.

When you turn women into objects, in porn or real life, you’re like an anorexic chasing lettuce round a dinner plate.

Without passion there’s no point. You just make yourself ridiculous.