Recipe leaves sour taste

DRAGONS’ Den might be coming back but in the meantime, the BBC keeps on trying out new formats for its business/entertainment slot. MILLION POUND MENU (BBC2) combines the gruff moneyed backers and fresh-faced hopefuls with another tempting ingredient... food.

Each week two contenders slug it out with sourdough, battle over the basil and pull their hair out over the pulled pork in a bid to impress pairs of restaurant-savvy investors. Each team has a pop-up dining space in buzzing Manchester and three days to convince the backers there’s marrow in their bones.

In the first episode, self-trained chef Euan Hutchison switched his shrimp-in-a-bun, food-van concept to sit-down dinners. Elsewhere, Ruth and Emily, rising stars of the restaurant scene already, had quit prestigious jobs at the Ritz to test out their all-British fine dining idea.

The risk proved worthwhile for them, less so for Euan, who was choking back tears at the end. Despite there being an obvious finale, where someone’s dishes got the dosh and someone’s didn’t, the show felt as flat as yesterday’s flatbread. The format didn’t help, because the hopefuls weren’t competing against each other, and there was precious little sign of the backers doing so either.

The grillings on Dragons’ Den sometimes seemed a little too savage but they were love-ins compared to the final stunt they’ve cooked up on this show.

The contenders have to sit for half an hour in their now moth balled restaurants, waiting to see if one, or both backers will show up with an offer. Someone waiting for someone else not to come is, at best, quite dull, at worst, unkind.

There was a soupçon of tension as one of Ruth and Emily’s investor team showed up close to the end and they had to wait a minute to see if the other one would appear. She did not. The investor who had turned up, chef and restaurateur Atul Kochhar, made his offer, and had it duly accepted. Like toast, nice, but not exciting.

Rather like the small print in a business deal, there was a catch with CRUISES FROM HELL: CAUGHT ON CAMERA (C4). The “caught on camera” bit meant stuff people had filmed on their phones as they were, variously, being shipwrecked, engulfed by sewage, boarded by over-friendly whales or falling overboard.

In a bid to add some depth, a crew of experts, including a naval architect, a meteorologist and a psychologist was brought on board. In terms of adding value they added no more than having some hip young comedians being ironic in between the clips. As often happens with shows of this kind, the real fascination came not from the maritime disaster but from the people bothering to record it.

One man, an American, was actually screaming ‘This is so awesome!’ as his boat was being turned into matchwood by a killer whale. Pick of the bunch, perhaps, was a tale that had everything to do with humans getting too cocky for their own good.

Their all-cardboard boat was a thing of wonder and it chugged along the Thames like billy-o, the thick layers of board shrugging off the water. It was not the same, sadly, for the glue, which began to dissolve, as a lot of glues do.

I wondered if they’d heard of Icarus, that Greek chap whose flying suit melted when he got too near the sun. Maybe we should all stay on dry land.