Gordon Ramsay’s Next Level Chef is like being tortured on the rack (of lamb)
2022 was a relatively successful year for Gordon Ramsay.
By my slanted and unreliable reckoning, he produced only the third worst show of the year with BBC1’s Future Food Stars, a bold attempt to fuse the SAS: Who Dares Wins and Apprentice formats with a prawn tempura.
Bad as it sounds, Future Food Stars still wasn’t in the same league of awful as Gordon’s quiz show Bank Balance, which heaved its unwieldy load all over the same channel in 2020 and was, by any system of weights and measures, the worst show of that year.
I’ve been secretly waiting and longing for him to repeat this sort of calamity ever since and think he might just have done it with this week’s big new arrival on ITV.
It’s called Next Level Chef, and don’t worry if your mind wanders or you forget that name.
With no little fanfare, Gordon and his two mentors, Nyesha Arrington and Paul Ainsworth, crowbar it into their observations and instructions approximately once every 17.3 seconds.
A visual nightmare
“Tonight, I’m looking for . . . one stunning next level rack of lamb.”
“Tonight’s next level dish is . . . THAT pork chop.”
They have to do this, obviously, because there’s no escaping the sense that Next Level Chef is the one thing British TV schedules really don’t need right now.
Yet another bloody cookery competition describing itself as “A show like no other”.
The flimsy justification for this hype is Gordon’s so-called “skyscraper of kitchens” (three), which work on a promotion/relegation basis and are filled with ever diminishing standards of equipment and ingredients for the three teams of four contestants, who have varying levels of experience and sob story.
A right multi-layered disaster zone it is too, because as dynamic and different as Gordon must have made it sound at the pitch, this tenement of tools doesn’t work on screen, at all. It’s chaotic, in fact.
A visual nightmare made worse by a platform of ingredients that grinds its way up and down, through all three levels, prompting an absolute frenzy of activity and a scrum of innuendo from contestants like Selwyn who exclaimed: “I didn’t know what I was grabbing.
“I had a small aubergine. Why? WHY?” Genetics? Bad luck? Room temperature? Who knows, Selwyn.
All I can tell you is that failure and disappointment seem to be built into the very architecture of Next Level Chef.
The golden rule for all cookery shows, no matter how unlikely the setting, though, is that the best ones are always those productions, like Bake Off and MasterChef, that have the good sense to build the tension slowly and do it with a gently self-mocking air, thereby avoiding the trap of trying to make cooking dinner sound like the moon landings.
It’ll probably come as no surprise, then, when I tell you Gordon and Next Level Chef hit the ground at 100 miles per hour and are so full of their own drama and self- importance they sound, by turns, ridiculous: “WATCH YOUR CABBAGE!”
And weirdly sexual: “Cauliflower puree in the basement? I love that.”
No single part of the show works, not even Gordon, who was a brilliant TV presence when he was just cooking and swearing.
For some reason or other, though, he’s decided he also needs to be creative, and both main channels are willing to indulge him.
The BBC does it because they want him on Strictly.
ITV, I’m assuming, would like to get Gordon in the jungle. And he’d be good value on either show.
I’m not sure, however, it’s worth the indignity of Bank Balance, Future Food Stars and this latest effort, which may turn out not to be the worst show of 2023.
But in terms of crap? It’s next level.
Great sporting insights
MARTIN KEOWN: “Sheffield Wednesday are a well-machined oil.”
Jobi McAnuff: “Neil will go away tonight, in the cold light of day, and be pleased.”
And Pien Meulensteen: “It always helps to play the fixture after the one before.”
- (Compiled by Graham Wray)
GREAT TV lies and delusions of the week. Harry: “I’m in such a good headspace now.”
This Morning, Gok Wan: “You want sunshine? Is my face not enough?” No.
Live At The Apollo, Judi Love: “I’m tired of always having to be the sexy one.” Then rest easy, Judi, whoever you’re dating.
TV GOLD
BBC1’s Happy Valley. BBC2’s beautiful Natural World: Forest Elephants.
Gregory Ebbs giving everyone on The Apprentice a fit of the giggles when he said: “Can I put my support in for Bradley’s meat?”
The utterly bats**t section of Tom Bradby’s Harry interview where it went full Steptoe: “I love you, Harold.”
And Sky Documentaries’ award-worthy, four-part series Spector, which spares us none of the music producer’s madness and eccentricities, including an interview with his wig-maker, but also doesn’t forget there’s a victim with a story and name, called Lana Clarkson.
Lookalike of the week
A bit of a shock
PRINCE Harry’s interview with Tom Bradby was a bit of a shock.
I hadn’t expected to warm to the lad, obviously.
Without the protective cloak of a Netflix edit or the Palace’s PR department, though, I was slightly taken aback by just how stubbornly, selfishly, vindictively, temperamentally and naturally unpleasant he is, to a degree you don’t normally find out with the darkest swamps of reality television (MTV’s Just Tattoo Of Us).
Checklisting all of his many evasions, delusions, contradictions and hypocrisies is, of course, utterly futile.
But it’s worth acknowledging the day after ITV’s coup, he promised Good Morning America he and Meghan won’t be moving back to Britain any time soon and then saying a profound “thank you”.
It’s more appreciated than Harry can ever know.
CLARIFICATION: Gordon Ramsay’s Next Level Chef, Callum: “There’s a mini chopper here.”
Mini? He’s six foot two.
Unexpected morons in the bagging area
THE Chase: Celebrity Special, Bradley Walsh: “In 1998 the Nagano Winter Olympics were held in what country?”
Adam Thomas: “London.”
The Chase, Bradley Walsh: “In Christianity, which biblical figure is referred to as The Messiah?” Michael: “Pass.”
The Weakest Link, Romesh Ranganathan: “In UK football, in 2022, which national team qualified for the men’s Fifa World Cup for the first time in 64 years?”
Carol McGiffin: “Southampton.”
VALLEY HEADS ABOVE
HAPPY Valley isn’t perfect.
The male characters are all too weakly and predictably written by Sally Wainwright, the deadpan delivery can become rather self-indulgent at times, and I’m also starting to get narked by the ease with which Sarah Lancashire’s character, Sergeant Catherine Cawood, always finds a parking spot, even in “Sheffield” city centre.
A feat of navigation and endurance that I know only too well would normally take up all six episodes of the BBC1 series.
But no domestic police drama has come close to matching the thrill of Happy Valley’s storyline since Line Of Duty.
The acting is also generally first rate, especially from Oliver Huntingdon, who brings genuine menace to the role of gangland heavy Ivan Sertic, rather than the stage school variety you normally see on telly.
And as for the advice Catherine gives her grandson Ryan?
“D***head are a fact of life.
“Everywhere you look there’ll be a d***head. The trick is to negotiate a way round them without them ever realising you think they are a d***head.”
ACCORDING to scientists, the smallest unit of time ever measured is a zeptosecond.
It’s a trillionth of a billionth of a second.
Or, in practical terms, the exact period of time between The Masked Singer host Joel Dommett revealing Piece Of Cake is “Lulu” and the moment the mad, old walloper launched into yet another version of Shout: “Weh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-ellllll.”
0.000000000000000000001 seconds. Henceforth, a Lulusecond.
Random TV irritations
LAZY-ASS Holly and Phil wishing This Morning viewers a “happy new year” on January 9.
Absolutely everyone on Next Level Chef shouting: “You’ve got this.”
Waterloo Road and Silent Witness sacrificing every last shred of credibility to the cult of woke and virtue-signalling.
And the moment Prince Harry told Tom Bradby, “What I’ll say to my family will be in private and I hope it stays that way”, which made my cheeks ache with laughter.
But not really in a good way.