PAUL WHO? MARY, QUEEN OF FOODIE JUDGES IS BACK — AND SHE’S A HIT!
FAR have we travelled and much have we seen, but where- oh-where is our favourite baking queen? Rest easy, crème pat comrades. Last night, the great ship Mary Berry sailed back on to the small screen, at the judging helm of a new show to find Britain’s Best home Cook (BBC1).
The 83-year-old was looking sprightly in a pair of jeans and a polka dot blouse, her Lady Penelope hair a familiar whip of blonde precision. And as always, her sweet but stern admonishments broke the bad news gently to blundering culinary hopefuls.
‘You’ve been so keen to put so much in we’ve got a little bit too much variety,’ she said to a lunatic called Trevor, who had made a lamb, beef and bacon cheeseburger, then garnished it with tempura prawns because it wasn’t quite barfsome enough.
To a farmer’s wife named Fiona, whose hamburger looked like a deep-fried camel hoof slapped in a bap, she was equally kindly. ‘I would say it is slightly overcooked,’ she murmured pleasantly as she nearly broke a tooth on the gigantic meat puck. Welcome back, Mary, the queen of food show judges. how we have missed you.
A lot rests on this new show, which the BBC are hoping will replace The Great British Bake Off in the nation’s affections over the next eight weeks. As the contestants stay in the same house between episodes, it’s rather like GBBO meets The Apprentice, with the emphasis on cooking rather than baking, and the added spice of host Claudia Winkleman gliding between the kitchen worktops, squealing like an adolescent under her fringe, which is currently at its most highland pony luxuriant. Claudia must have bat radar, to negotiate around the fridges in the way that she does.
‘I promise you I am here to help,’ she tells contestants, and to be fair she did open a jar and mop up a spillage with kitchen roll, proving that she is not the highest-paid woman at the BBC for nothing. She does not touch a morsel of food – ever. When Mary impishly asked her what she would make with a bag of walnuts, Claudia was stumped.
‘I would panic. I would race home and weep,’ she said. Yeah, sister, and then call your chef. Rumour has it that Claudia once made a slice of toast back in 1987, but no matter. She can be irritating, but her anarchic head girl personality is just what this show needs. The special chemistry between Claudia and Mary – who has never been more relaxed – absolutely sparkles. Paul who? I don’t even want to talk about him.
Theformat finds ten home cooks cooking an ultimate dish, then making another preparation showcasing a prize ingredient. To avoid elimination those deemed to have failed must compete in a cook- off, which is – bizarrely – tasted in silence by the judges.
Alongside Mary is Gregg Wallacealike produce expert Chris Bavin, and top chef Dan Doherty. They are both sincere and straightforward with interesting things to say about the dishes, and they are not trying to be superstars. Just as well, because this is the Claudia and Mary show all the way, baby. The bland men seem to have been hired as pretty boy back-ups to pad out the panel, an unusual gender reversal which I enjoy hugely.
Indeed, it would be fun to know what the gender pay gap is on this show. Suffice to say no one is expecting the BBC’s Carrie Gracie to picket the frying pans on behalf of oppressed female broadcasters any time soon.
If there is one flaw, it is that the entire premise is about home cooks – whatever they might be – but contestants strain to make menu-friendly dishes and plate their food up restaurant style. There are meals served on slates, on marble ovals, there are chips in little wire baskets and mini buckets, plus towers and smears – why? They don’t eat like that at home, surely? And while there might be something inherently comic about a catastrophic cake – it just looks funny on television – there is nothing amusing about a catastrophic burger, which just looks like roadkill.
Yet somehow – somehow! – the Beeb have dug deep and found bounce, innocence and grace in a tired format. There are charming contestants, including cool dude Tobi, a lady called ‘Q’ who applies her lipstick when she is finished, and Asian flavour-obsessed Pippa, a tissue bank technician.
Fiona might have been my favourite cooking show contestant of all time, but she was gone before we got to know her, as the luckless Irish farmer’s wife was the first to be booted off last night.
She trembled with nerves throughout, she never got the hang of having to wear a health ’n’ safety plastic glove when handling raw meat in the studio kitchen, or of sizing down her efforts. ‘I’ve got five hungry men and I just think big,’ she said. her Swiss roll resembled a hunk of rusty drainpipe filled with cream, while her poached eggs were an affront to chickendom. Relaxing in the house the cooks share between trials, she was seen holding a large glass of wine and looking worried. In spirit, in execution, in the flesh and on the plate, she was more like a home cook than any of the others.
however, in the search for Britain’s Best home Cook, the last thing they actually want is a real home cook. Still, what fun. It’s a hit!
EVERY three years, like millions of women over 50, I dutifully turn up for my mammogram scan, grateful that the state should provide this service.
I am attended to by kindly nurses and technicians at St Mary’s Hospital in West london, where the Duchess of cambridge recently gave birth. unlike her treatment, mine is free, and would continue to be free should, God forbid, the scans ever find something.
Being in that small room is always a sobering moment; as the compression plates grip and the X-ray machine buzzes, a woman can feel very vulnerable. There you are, half naked, a tiny, quaking worker bee inside a massive overworked, understaffed, oversubscribed, under resourced, buzzing hive of supposedly world-class medical care.
What if they find the black pip of something bad in your breast? What if they don’t? Perhaps a wily cancer is there, but they miss it entirely? In this monolithic organisation, where hundreds of X-rays must be inspected every week, we patients must trust the tired human eyes scanning for abnormalities, we just have to trust the system. What other hope have we got?
However, this week that hope and trust was shaken. Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt has revealed that some women’s lives may have been shortened as a result of a nine- year- long computer glitch failure in screening.
nearly a decade of malfunction that nobody noticed, on either side of the patient/ doctor divide.
THE glitch concerns women due a screening between the ages of 68 to 71, from 2009 to now, but who were not called back for their appointments. What? Is that so bad, I initially thought, puffed up with the utter callousness of my relative youth.
If one has lived to the ripe old age of 70-plus cancer free, then what a marvellous innings. A cause for celebration, rather than complaint?
Surely individuals should have been more proactive about a check-up in the first place? Then I really started to think about it, and changed my mind entirely.
For a start, for years the NHS has expounded a culture of care that nannies citizens to the point of distraction. We are nannied about everything, from our consumption of milk, sugar, alcohol, chocolates, red meat, cheese, you name it, to our exercise routines, or lack thereof, plus the frequency of sexual partners, cigarette smoking, hand washing, teeth cleaning, hair brushing and the drinking of absurd amounts of water every day.
We have come to expect this nannying, this constant personal health caretaker whispering in our ear, insisting we check for warning signs for everything, and be tested regularly for everything else.
If that persistent voice suddenly falls silent, it’s not wrong for those women of a certain age to presume the cancer cloud of danger must have passed, and that they were in the clear at last.
The proportion of women who may have died prematurely as a result of this hiccup is actually quite small, but that is no consolation if your mother, grandmother or friend died.
The NHS estimates that 450,000 women slipped through this glitch, and 140,000 have already died — up to 270 potentially prematurely of undetected cancer, or cancer detected too late to save them.
NOW the remaining 310,000 face an anxious wait of up to six months to discover if they have the disease. I don’t expect my check-up on time this year.
This latest episode also makes me realise we have to recalibrate our relationship with the NHS, to curb expectations. That comforting assumption that we will be cared for from the cradle to the grave? Forget it.
There is no longer the money for the latest drug treatments in this country, and services are no longer in place to help everyone.
unlike many knee-jerk lefties keen to make political capital, I don’t blame the conservative government or Jeremy Hunt, who I think has been an exemplary public servant battling heroically with an unwinnable brief.
I think it is more that Britain, or rather more specifically england, has changed in deep and cataclysmic ways. Population growth is swamping the NHS, along with people who use the system and don’t pay into it, and medics who train in the system, then move into more lucrative private practice.
That doesn’t excuse this current breast screening debacle, but it does illuminate the fragile balance between modern expectations and reality when it comes to the NHS.
However, one point. It would be wrong to lose faith in the screening system entirely. not least because, for most of us, it’s all we have.
More importantly, we should remember that while it is deeply regrettable and horrific that hundreds may have died before their time, thousands upon thousands have been saved. nannied and harried or not, we have to hold on to that thought.