Why on earth did ITV serve up this lazy, pointless dross?
Here he is again. I’ve never met anyone, not in the past 20 years anyway, who expressed an interest in watching another Gordon Ramsay show, and yet they keep coming. The production company behind Next Level Chef didn’t hesitate to give Ramsay a starring role, but the company in question is called Studio Ramsay, so I think you can see what happened there. Why ITV would buy this dross, though, I have no idea.
Next Level Chef is awful. I’m sure Ramsay would say that he hates laziness, but this is one of the laziest shows I’ve seen. It takes bits of every other cookery show on TV, gives it a hint of The X Factor – there are three groups of contestants, each guided by a judge who acts as their mentor – and expects us to be impressed by the fact it has a pointlessly expensive set.
The gimmick is that there are three kitchens, on three levels. The top kitchen is an “ultra-modern, chef ’s paradise”. The middle one is a standard restaurant kitchen. The basement has cheap pans. The chef who produces each week’s Next Level Dish wins a place in the top kitchen for their team, and the losing team ends up in the basement, and nobody really cares about the middle. The quality of the kitchen has no effect on the quality of the dishes, rendering the whole exercise pointless. Each contestant – the line-up is a mix of professionals, amateurs and “social media chefs” – has to grab ingredients from a platform which goes up and down like a dumb waiter, and which stops in their kitchen for 30 seconds. They tend to panic and end up with a random selection of food. Think Ready Steady Cook, but considerably less fun.
“This is Next Level Chef, the world’s toughest cooking competition ever,” Ramsay announces at the start. Hang on, I thought “cooking doesn’t get tougher than this” on Masterchef? They can’t both be right. And it’s horribly American. The original series was made for Fox in the US, and despite the establishing shots of London by night, the production values and everything else here feels very un-british: glossy, OTT, with contestants whooping and fistbumping. The judges – Ramsay, British chef Paul Ainsworth and American Nyesha Arrington – take it deathly seriously and yell: “Go, go, go, go, go!” at regular intervals. Please. You’re in a TV cookery contest, not the Battle of Goose Green.
Apparently, the concept is similar to a 2019 Spanish horror film called The Platform, where the residents of the lower floors resort to cannibalism. Now there’s an idea.
Some stories are so good, and so improbable, that it would be impossible to make a duff TV show about them. So it is with Welcome to Chippendales (Disney+), a drama about the rise and fall of their founder, Somen “Steve” Bannerjee.
What makes the tale fun is the unlikeliness of this man – a mildmannered Indian petrol station attendant – masterminding the success of a half-naked male dance-troupe catering to crazed hen parties. Episode one neatly explains how he managed this, and it does involve a fair amount of happenstance and other people’s good ideas (later in the eight-part series, Juliette Lewis pops up as a woman who has invented those quick-release trousers that can be whipped off in one movement). But it was Bannerjee’s idea to open a strip club for women and to name the club Chippendales: “Like the 18th-century cabinet maker! It’s classy!”
As The Chippendales become a sensation, Bannerjee becomes jealous and paranoid. He hires Nick De Noia (played by Murray Bartlett, who was so brilliant as the hotel manager in series one of The White Lotus), a talented choreographer who turns the ragtag bunch of performers into a professional troupe, but begins to resent his influence. As the series goes on, De Noia becomes Bannerjee’s rival, and Bartlett emerges as the star. Kumail Nanjiani seems unsure whether to play Bannerjee as hero or villain, and his switch from endearing to raging control freak is abrupt.
The script is entertaining, however, as when Bannerjee sums up why Chippendales calendars are flying off the shelves: “Women love to know what date it is – and naked men!” But at times it’s having too much fun. There is a darkness at the heart of the real-life story – it involves more than one murder – which doesn’t translate here. Episode one features Paul Snider, a sleazy nightclub promoter who becomes Bannerjee’s first business partner. The fact that he murdered his wife, Playboy model Dorothy Stratten, in a jealous rage, is a sign that he wasn’t a very nice man, yet he’s played here by Downton Abbey’s nice Dan Stevens as essentially harmless.
Next Level Chef ★
Welcome to Chippendales ★★★