Gordon goes off the boil with a triple-decker flop
GORDON Ramsay promised that his new show would be ‘ the world’s toughest cooking competition, ever’. But his overhyped offering Next Level Chef has left ITV with some very expensive egg on its face.
Sources indicate that it cost ‘well over £500,000’ to build the extremely complex set at the LH2 Studios in London, which features three complete kitchens stacked atop each other — one basic, one better and the top one pro standard — as well as a lift.
ITV executive Katie Rawcliffe said that the network had built ‘perhaps the most ambitious TV studio the world has to offer’ for the show, in which chefs compete to impress judges and reach the better ingredients and equipment at the top.
The hope, when commissioning it, was that the heavy cost of the mega-set could at least be spread over several runs of the show.
ITV also thought that if Next Level Chef took off globally, international versions might be filmed in the UK on that very set, further defraying the cost. However, after disastrous viewing figures on its debut last week, the show looks certain to be scrapped without ceremony — and the triple-layer kitchen (nightmare) along with it.
On its debut last Wednesday, it garnered only 1.6 million viewers, an audience share of 11 per cent and well below the 2.7 million slot average for that time of night. It was beaten by BBC1’s Ambulance. This week 1.5 million watched and it was beaten heavily in its slot by Silent Witness on BBC1, which got 2.4 million. Critics were also unconvinced, calling it ‘ contrived’ and ‘bewildering’ with a ‘pointlessly expensive set’. One described it as ‘the laziest show I’ve ever seen’. In the programme, home, social media and pro chefs compete in three teams in the three kitchens and try to impress Ramsay and his fellow judges: chef Paul Ainsworth and Nyesha Arrington, a former competitor on the American TV show Top Chef. The prize is £100,000, plus a year of mentoring from the judges. Rawcliffe, who is ITV ’ s head of entertainment commissioning, ordered eight episodes of the show from Studio Ramsay Global (which is coowned by Fox) in June last year. A version has aired on Fox in America and been enough of a hit to be commissioned for a second series.
The show isn’t the famously foul-mouthed chef’s first flop. Last year he fronted Future Food Stars for BBC1, which followed 12 food and drink entrepreneurs as they competed to win a £150,000 investment from Ramsay.
The show performed disappointingly, gaining 1.8 million viewers in prime time, and only just managing to sneak ahead of a travelogue presented by Joanna Lumley.
In 2021 he fronted prime-time BBC game show Bank Balance, in which hopefuls tried to win money by stacking ‘gold bars’ in different zones on a tilting board. That was axed after viewing figures fell to a woeful 1.6 million.
RAMSAY has had a very successful TV career with shows including Hell’s Kitchen and Kitchen Nightmares, but is currently in the middle of an unenviable run.
Neither Studio Ramsay nor ITV would comment on the cost of building the set or its fate.
However, an ITV source described the format as ‘feeling genuinely fresh and innovative’ and added: ‘Currently, 2.5 million viewers have watched the first episode of Next Level Chef on ITV1 and ITVX, so it’s misleading to say the figures are disappointing and obviously too early to talk about future series.’