If you can’t stand the heat...
NOW returning for its 150th series and featuring two presenters who must be well into their second century, MasterChef has become something of an institution for the BBC.
Well, I say ‘institution’ in the sense that it must feel, at this stage, like John Torode and Gregg Wallace are serving some ridiculously long prison sentence without any possibility of parole. Or, as it’s more commonly known in TV land, cancellation.
Actually, as it happens, this is only the cookery show’s 14th programme – in its current iteration, that is.
There is also MasterChef Professionals, MasterChef kids, various different roadshows and let’s not forget the endless repeats.
In fact, while consulting my crystal ball of daft predictions, I see a time when more people will have appeared on this bloody programme than have actually watched it.
That’s not say MasterChef is bad, of course. After all, you don’t get to present a programme for decades if nobody likes it.
But its lustre has long been stolen by the likes of Great British Bake Off and while producers might say its appeal lies in its timelessness, that could be down to the fact that every season has now become virtually interchangeable viewers’ minds.
Let’s face it, the only way to tell which is the most current series is to look for the most ridiculous hair cuts worn by some of the younger male contestants.
Still, the show remains eminently watchable for one particularly popular segment – the restaurant challenge.
That’s when the amateur hopefuls are thrown into the hot, panic-ridden fury of a high-end restaurant kitchen for a lunchtime service.
The appeal of this particular item invariably lies in the shape of a professional chef trying in to be nice to the contestants until they discover that the newbies have ruined yet another plate of wildly expensive braised swan tongues and start to freak out.
We have few joys in life, and the endless array of Government-funded killjoys seem determined to remove even those, but watching a hapless amateur cook being filleted remains one of the guiltiest of guilty pleasures.
The first half of the Electric Dreams (Channel4, tonight, 10pm), the big budget anthology series based on some of Philip K Dick’s short stories, was a rather hit-and-miss affair.
In fact, some of the episodes were crushingly disappointing. That’s often the way with Dick’s material, of course. Frankly, some of his lesser known work is unreadable. It returns tonight with Greg Kinnear in Father Figure as a man replaced by space aliens from beyond the moon who are quietly colonising earth...