Masterchef... so comforting even anorexic vegans lap it up

MY FAVOURITE film of all time is Annie Hall. It contains one of my favourite jokes. Two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort and one says: ‘Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.’ The other says, ‘Yeah, I know. And such small portions.’

That sums up how Woody Allen feels about life. It’s awful and hard but you want more of it and you don’t really want it to end.

That joke also rather more literally sums up how I feel about Masterchef, which announced its winner, Saliha MahmoodAhmed, on Friday night.

The food didn’t look that appetising – the fondant potatoes were woefully undercooked and the meat almost raw when it came to the ubiquitous venison (I kept being reminded of the blood oozing out of Bambi time and again).

It was also insanely overly intricate – who in their right mind would add chicken liver to wild rice? And yet... such small portions! Three hours of peeling, basting and pureeing of 16 different aromats (what’s an aromat when it’s at home?) to produce a green dot the size of a full stop that tastes like toilet cleaner (pine is the new pomegranate, apparently). The blanching of a duck no fewer than six times (that’s tantamount to waterboarding, surely?) to end up with a sliver the size of a postage stamp! But still I didn’t want the series to end.

I’m a recovering anorexic and also a vegan, so not really the target audience.

For me, watching all 25 episodes of this year’s Masterchef was about as pointless as a nun watching a blue movie.

I didn’t want to learn new techniques or how to perform any last bit of it: who on earth has the time to make a ponzu and dashi jelly by boiling bones for two hours when you can just pour hot water over a few cubes of Rowntree’s raspberry?

I certainly didn’t want it messing up my kitchen, but boy, was it fascinating and comforting.

And here’s the rub. I suspect Masterchef’s popularity isn’t thanks to the food at all. It’s because it reassures us that, for an hour or so, the world isn’t such a horrid place.

It isn’t controlled by Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin but by John Torode and Gregg Wallace – men who like crumble and cry when someone purees a yellow pepper.

THE glimpses inside all those Michelin-starred kitchens show us pristine steel, order and fresh produce, not mouse droppings, zerohours contracts and swearing, which is what most commercial kitchens contain. A trip for the final four to South Africa showcased lovely upmarket barbecues, not slums, where cooking over an open flame for a lifetime gives you lung cancer.

In this Masterchef fantasy land, the working-class boy or Yorkshire farmer’s wife or recovering cancer patient (last year’s winner) or overworked hospital junior doctor (the aforementioned Saliha) really can triumph in a food business that, back in the real world, would look down on anyone like them as ‘amateurs’.

Actually, Saliha’s victory over the wonderfully twinkly eyed DJ Steve smacked of Masterchef wanting to steal a little of Bake Off’s thunder.

Saliha is this year’s Nadiya Hussain – a superbrainy Pakistani powerhouse who, admirable though she was, only made me think what a waste of all that (presumably) NHSfunded training and use of resources if her ambition now is not to save lives but to knock up something heavily spiced and laced with saffron.

Saliha was initially my favourite, as she started off the series championing vegetables, but she soon succumbed to the meat mania, despite having glimpsed inside the nation’s arteries and hearts.

Yet, I will miss Masterchef, that reassuring, steamy end to my day. How about a spin-off for those of us with withdrawal symptoms? A bit like Britain’s Got More Talent, but this time a prequel: The Great British Abattoir, anyone?