Yet another cooking show — and it’s The Apprentice in oven mitts
Britain is officially the fattest country in northern Europe. We make the French look like string beans and compared to the lean German frankfurters, we’re a bunch of chubby sausages.
So it’s hardly surprising we appear to watch more cooking shows than any other nation on earth. take any telly format, stick it in a white hat and apron, and we’ll gobble it up.
The Chefs’ Brigade (BBC2) pretends to be an international competition for young professional cooks, but really it’s the apprentice in a pair of oven mitts. ten raw recruits from kitchens in cafes and hotels are thrown together, under the tutelage of celebrity chef Jason atherton, and pitted against top teams from Europe.
Jason’s restaurants have four Michelin stars, and he made sure everyone knew it. He rammed those stars down our throats like he was stuffing turkeys.
Being a cordon bleu whizz, of course, he’s more likely to be stuffing a guinea fowl — which he did, with wild chicory on the side and a teaspoonful of mashed potato.
For the cook-off, Jason took his trainees to Puglia in southern italy where, he told us: ‘the food when you eat it, it just feels alive.’ Does he have a Michelin star for talking pretentious gibberish, too?
His young chefs have a lot to
learn, and not just about chopping vegetables, if they’re ever going to match the master. their vocabulary was all cliche: ‘it’s the real deal now’; ‘We’re gonna smash it’; ‘that’s an ego check’.
to ramp up the artificial sense of tension, apprenti-chefs can be sent home at any time.
One unlucky lad was kicked off the show after a day for being shy and feeling homesick.
a great deal was said about the importance of ‘leadership’ and ‘bonding’, but this was brutal for a young man who hadn’t done anything wrong except miss his mum. He was treated with all the consideration shown to the average guinea fowl.
Jason’s crew won the first contest easily, beating the italians by reproducing their own menu in their own kitchen.
We’ll have to take the judges’ word for it, though it was hard to understand what the young Brits did that was so much better.
Perhaps their food just tasted ‘more alive’ . . . in which case, that guinea fowl is going to need a ruddy good vet. there were vets in abundance on Counting Tigers: A Survival Special (itV) — far more of them, in fact, than big cats.
this oddly piecemeal documentary followed the census held across india every four years to keep tally: it’s thought there are now fewer than 4,000 in the wild.
the show was presented by naturalist Martin Hughes-Games, the Springwatch exile. But it appeared that someone high up at itV panicked that he wasn’t a big enough name to front a primetime doc, and so St Joanna Lumley was drafted in for the voiceover.
this created a strange pingpong effect, as Martin spoke one line to camera before Joanna floated in with a bit of narration. the pair seemed to exist in two different programmes. One moment he was trying to talk while clinging to an elephant, the next she was purring ethereally over a picture of tigers in the sunset.
there were some lovely snatches of tiger footage, but Martin and Joanna didn’t manage to explain very much.
Why was that scrawny Sundarban tiger splashing around in terror as men chased it in boats?
What happened to the two orphaned cubs whose mother was killed by poachers?
Most of all, why was one tiger called Spotty? Spotty!
STOLEN CRIME OF THE NIGHT: A corpse found at the start of Der Pass (Sky Atlantic) straddled the Alpine border between Germany and Austria. We’ve seen that idea before, in The Bridge and The Tunnel. It’s inevitable... gruesome killings always attract copycats.