Master classy
THE BBC was given a quick lesson this week in the potential pitfalls of booking Katie Price.
Box office gold she may be but there’s always a chance that between filming and transmission, Katie’s home life will take a sudden twist that threatens to derail the whole show.
And so it proved, as her Celebrity MasterChef debut coincided with some worrying headlines.
For once, the BBC decided the show must go on – and I’m glad it did. For selfish reasons, had it been pulled I would have been gutted.
This has been the best series of celebrities cooking while being yelled at by two shouty blokes in years.
I’d even go as far as to say it has saved summer for poor, starved TV viewers – particularly if, like me, you had the misfortune to sit through nightly episodes of Love Island in which much the same things happened every night.
However, the main reason I was happy to see that the Beeb had reined in its usual twitchiness was that Katie had a storming week in that kitchen.
I wouldn’t be so patronising as to claim her cooking confounded all expectations but even by her own admission, it was a welcome surprise.
It also cocked a snook at the show’s producers, who had mischievously/ snarkily decided the best way to celebrate Katie’s arrival would be to task everyone with creating the perfect dumplings.
The only surprise was they didn’t slip some giant melons into the fruit identification round as well.
Katie rose above it all with grace. She certainly fared better than Gregg Wallace, who got fully carried away, yelling: “Melissa Johns’ dumplings are enormous! It looks like she’s got a couple of rugby balls in there!” That wasn’t the worst thing Gregg did to former Corrie star Melissa, though. Not only did he and John Torode needlessly mock her lumpy rice by holding it aloft like the Statue of Liberty, they also chose to kick her out in favour of Joe Swash, who’d spent the week winking at the camera, taking the mickey out of everyone else’s cooking and being a general pain in the Aris. Now, you could be charitable and suggest Joe was simply putting on an act for the cameras. Sadly, there is one obvious flaw in that defence. Millions of people witnessed him trying to act on EastEnders for five years.
I was happy that Katie had a storming week in that kitchen