Contest is cooking nicely
IT’S called Knockout Week for a reason,” points out one of the contestants on MASTERCHEF (BBC1, 9pm), as the competition enters, er, Knockout Week.Well, you really do learn something new every day, don’t you?
I’d always assumed it was called KnockoutWeek for no reason at all, and that the producers could just as easily have called it Funny Trousers Week or I’ve Got A Lovely Bunch Of CoconutsWeek.
But no, it’s turns out the KnockoutWeek label is of genuine significance, signalling the fact that of the 16 contestants who remain in the competition, a whopping seven will have been sent packing by Friday night, trudging home with just their memories, their if-onlys and their really rather natty personalised aprons.
The way it’s going to happen is like this. Eight will return for tonight’s episode, of which three will be eliminated.The other eight will return forWednesday’s, three of whom will also be sent packing.
Then the 10 left standing on Friday will be boiled down to nine, ahead of next week’s even more nail-biting phase (I do hope that you are keeping up with this, because next week they’ll be facing bootcamp, the six-chair challenge and a bushtucker trial).
But back to tonight, and for the five who make it through the first fairly straightforward task (“Ninety minutes, one Play-Doh food…” is how judge John Torode explains what’s required of them) there’s arguably the biggest test so far: to head to Da Terra restaurant in London and prepare lunch under the watchful eye of chef Rafael Cagali, while at no point allowing the words: “Excuse me, am I meant to have a clue who Rafael Cagali is?” to pass their lips.
Elsewhere, the tension is mounting almost as much in the penultimate part of LIAR (ITV, 9pm).
Last week’s, you may recall, shed significant new light on the character of schoolteacher Laura (Joanne Froggatt), as we saw how she’d put her dying dad out of his misery, just as he’d asked her to.
Laura continues to deny murdering multiple-rapist Andrew Earlham (Ioan Gruffudd) but while that’s obviously an entirely different matter, could it be significant that she’s tougher than we thought, at least when she feels the situation demands it?
In the meantime, how is she going to explain that incriminating necklace the police found in the shipping container?
Over on BBC2, meanwhile, in THE REAL MICHAEL JACKSON (9pm), investigative reporter Jacques Peretti begins by turning back the clock half a century, looking for clues as to why Jackson became the man he did.