More than just desserts
THIS is it! After eight weeks of sizzling action, the MASTERCHEF final arrives (BBC1, 8pm), piping hot and ready to tickle your tast buds.The remaining trio of chefs will whip on their pinnies and fire up the fan ovens in preparation for the final round of kitchen combat.
Tonight’s finale follows a familiar format – instead of the chefs making food based on themes or cooking for restaurant critics, they’re asked to produce the best three dishes of their lives to impress judges John Torode and Gregg Wallace.
We’ll be sad to see the final morsels of the show disappear, given the memorable moments the 2023 series has cooked up, like Omar serving up duck that was practically still quacking to Gregg, who refused to eat it.
We remember contestant John getting choked up about his sugar-free tart, not because Gregg criticised its runny centre, but because he’d made it in honour of his diabetic daughter. Awww.
This series seemed to have a weird obsession with tacos – the soufflé of 2023 – and Gregg gave us all insight into his Saturday afternoons chezWallace when he announced he eats sardines on toast while watching the rugby (someone open a window!)
Also, Gregg was absent due to illness, with the delightful Monica Galetti and Anna Haugh stepping in as Torode’s sidekick, bringing a different flavour to those episodes.
All told, it’s been a delicious helping of a show from a recipe that never seems to grow stale.
Like MasterChef, WHO DO
YOU THINK YOU ARE? (BBC1, 9pm) is another TV juggernaut, a long-running format that keeps on delivering fascinating tales of yore.
The genealogy series’ first subject this year is Andrew Lloyd Webber, who comes to the show wondering where his penchant for making jazz hands comes from.
Although his parents were musical types and his little brother Julian became a celebrated cellist, nobody in the recent LloydWebber clan embraced musical theatre like the young Andrew, who went on to create stage sensations Cats, Starlight Express,The Phantom Of The Opera and Evita.
Andrew follows his mother’s line looking for musical types but instead finds a soldier who played a pivotal role in the Battle of Waterloo, and up his father’s family tree, discovers a missionary who tended London’s poor and needy.
But then the experts unearth roots in Europe that take Andrew to the Netherlands, where there were ancestors who had as much of a love of the stage as he, and, weirdly, among their ranks was another gifted cello player.
It’s an uncanny coincidence or evidence that DNA is stronger than we realise. His episode kicks-off a promising series in which Strictly’s Kevin Clifton and adventurer Bear Grylls also delve into their pasts.