Gordon nicks Sugar’s recipe but it falls flat
Gordon Ramsay’s Future Food Stars BBC1, Thursday The Great House Revival Sunday, RTÉ One The 94th Academy Awards Sky Cinema, Monday
For 12 weeks, The Apprentice occupied the 9pm slot on BBC1 on Thursday nights, so what do you replace that ratings juggernaut with? Well, the Dealz version of The Apprentice, basically. Gordon Ramsay’s Future Food Stars follows exactly the same premise, with 12 food producers competing for a £150,000 investment of his own money in their businesses.
Unlike Alan Sugar, who seems wary of ever leaving his desk unless there is a limousine to shuttle him to address his wannabe entrepreneurs, action man Gordon made a dramatic entrance to meet the contestants assembled on a beach.
Hanging from the side of a helicopter, and clad in a wetsuit, he dived into the sea and swam to shore in Newquay in Cornwall, where his hair seemed to have miraculously dried itself by the time he addressed them.
As a team-building exercise, he then invited them one by one to jump 10m off a cliff into the water too, though what sort of insight he might derive from this never was fully explained.
Their task then was to come up with menus for street food stalls, which has been an enduring fixture of The Apprentice itself, drawing yet more unfavourable comparisons. One hopeful, an Italian called Lorenzo, convinced his three teammates to go for monkfish tacos, but on the day itself left the cooking to a colleague who never had cooked monkfish before, while he took the orders and manned the till. This, it proved, was a calculated gamble that allowed him to tell everyone who ordered that the tacos were his idea, immediately exposing him as a narcissist.
Fellow Italian Valentina was a vegan, and rather an angry one at that, refusing to be a team player and insisting on getting her own way. I immediately felt sorry for her, because her grumpiness to me looked like it easily could have been fixed if someone just gave her a decent bacon sandwich and a hug.
As was the case in this year’s Apprentice, though, most of the contestants were a few ingredients short of the full recipe for success. Their service was chaotic, they couldn’t agree on pretty much anything, and their desperation to individually shine merely placed them front and centre on Gordon’s chopping board.
Instead of the group dissection of where the task went wrong, the four losers were interviewed one by one and, as I expected, Vincenzo was the first to feel the wrath of Ramsay. The biggest disappointment was a clear opportunity missed. Just as Alan Sugar says ‘you’re fired’, I really though Ramsay could have done the decent thing and said, ‘Lorenzo – you’re fried’.
Confrontational reality television can indeed be entertaining, but the programmes with a soft centre can be just as enjoyable. Hugh Wallace returned on Sunday with The Great House Revival on RTÉ One, and went to Passage West in Co. Cork, where Rob Hennessey had bought a 170-year-old house and hoped to put it all to rights on a budget of €120,000. Wallace, ever the sage, suggested vital amendments to Rob’s plans that only slightly diluted his ambitions, and Rob set about most of the work himself.
His dedication was spectacular, as he slept beside a storage heater in the smallest room through a very cold winter, and saw his plans stall as various lockdowns came and went. Then the story took a lovely twist. Single Rob started dating Katie, and soon baby Caoimhe entered the equation too. They ended up with a magnificent family home, and deserved every floorboard, shutter and window of it.
Avuncular Wallace is the perfect host for this show because unlike the Ramsays of this world, he listens first, then offers gentle advice, with not an eff or a blind (well, maybe the odd Venetian one) in sight.
My only real issue is that RTÉ, for some odd reason, piles lots of shows with similar themes into very short timeframes. The Great House Revival occupies the Room To Improve slot; Wallace’s other show, Home Of The Year, concludes on Tuesday, while Baz Ashmawy’s DIY SOS: The Big Build Ireland returns tonight. Interlocking with these first-run shows have been and will be repeats of Maggie Molloy’s Cheap Irish Homes and Goodbye House, in which friends attempt to find the perfect home for someone on the move. Enjoyable as snooping can be, there’s a limit to how many times I can ooh and aah when a door opens to a kitchen or a bedroom.
I wished I had used my bedroom a little earlier on Monday morning, when I finally got to sleep close to 5am after staying up for The 94th Academy Awards. A friend and I watched them together, on WhatsApp anyway, me in Co. Wexford and he in Sydney, where it was the afternoon, so he definitely got the better end of the deal.
No matter how shocked you might have been waking up to news of The Slap Heard Around The World, it was electrifying watching live, when I had no idea of what was going on until Will Smith started roaring the F word at Chris Rock. The energy was completely sucked out of the theatre, and everything that followed felt like a damp squib on what should have been Smith’s most triumphant night.
As for his self-aggrandising speech when he won Best Actor, well, I was tired and grumpy and I wanted to go to bed. While I never would condone violence of any kind, I honestly felt like giving him a slap back.