Ramsay’s 24 Hours To Hell And Back
Channel 4, Thursday 19 July, 10pm
No one could accuse Gordon Ramsay’s new show of being excessively innovative. It’s a slightly cumbersome mix of Changing
Rooms, Kitchen Nightmares, Hell’s Kitchen and Hotel Hell. Granted, most of those shows are his, so he’s mainly ripping himself off. Yet beneath the unwieldy title and contrived format, there’s some pretty extraordinary stuff going on. As ever with this type of show, the key is in the casting, and this week’s opener has an absolute doozy of a subject: Vinny, manager of Bella Gianni’s restaurant in the town of Congers, New York. Vinny has issues. Mainly with anger. When he’s not having F-bomb-laced rows with his head chef, he’s berating his customers. He’s the embodiment of toxic masculinity. So, when alpha male Gordon comes along, I did worry the whole show was going to descend into a pointless bout of dick waving, figuratively speaking. But cunningly, before Ramsay even shows up, he gets his production team to secretly film at the restaurant using hidden cameras, and forces the staff to watch the results. They’re not good. The word “disgusting” comes up a lot, and we have to watch Gordo retching when faced with the kitchen’s grimmest raw materials. There’s also a great moment when Ramsay goes undercover for a meal at the joint, disguised as the dad of a hungry family, and has to taste such treats as rank salad dressing and rubbery calamari. Once the macho skirmishes subside, Ramsay gets through to Vinny using raw emotion. Tears are shed, and the transformation begins. We may have seen this stuff before, but this is still f**king great TV, as Gordon would say.