For a while, the cookery show was on the ropes. The entire form had started to eat itself, with an endless parade of identical nobodies cooking identical recipes in front of identical soft-focus fairy lights, identically soundtracked by someone whose music collection consisted of 10 copies of Back to Black: The Instrumentals.
But no more! Suddenly there has been a resurgence of the big beasts. Stick a pin anywhere in the terrestrial schedules at the moment and you’re likely to find an A-list celebrity chef roaring out of the woodwork to show these anaemic youngsters what they’re missing. Jamie’s there. Nigella’s there. Rick’s there. Paul and Mary are both there, snarling at each other across the channels like a pair of scorned ex-lovers. But life is full and nobody has time to watch them all, so here’s a quick ranking of all the big cookery shows, ordered from worst to best.
5. Jamie and Jimmy’s Friday Night Feast, Channel 4
Are you an absolute lad? Do you enjoy legendary bantz? Do you tend to greet things by bellowing “woy-oy” at the sky? Then you’ll love Jamie and Jimmy’s Friday Night Feast, a sort of witless culinary Top Gear that nobody watches because it’s on when its target audience is busy pre-gaming for a big night out. Or maybe nobody watches it because sitting through a single episode is like being pinned down and forcibly injected with a concentrated dose of Jamie Oliver’s worst impulses. Nobody even knows why Jamie and Jimmy’s Friday Night Feast is even a thing. The assumption is that Jamie’s farmer friend forced him into making it via some sort of elaborate blackmail scheme, but that’s pure conjecture at this point.
4. Mary Berry’s Country House Secrets, BBC One
In Mary Berry’s Country House Secrets, Berry interminably stalks around some National Trust property or other before going into its kitchen and whipping up an anonymous puddle of flaccid beige-grey pre-metric almost-food. I have never felt the last vestiges of life drain from my body while trapped at the bottom of a well, but I imagine that watching Mary Berry’s Country House Secrets is a close enough comparison.
3. Paul Hollywood: A Baker’s Life, Channel 4
This, you have to admit, is not particularly well timed. Hollywood’s image has taken a battering over the last year, from his eagerness to ditch the rest of the GBBO gang and hop channels to the recent break-up of his marriage via his pathological midlife infatuation with big red cars. Ideally, now is not the time to air the “I’m just a humble baker, welcome to my story” series he presumably got handed as a sweetener for staying with Bake Off. And that’s a shame because it isn’t bad. Once you cut away all the nonsense, Hollywood remains a skilled baker and a decent communicator, and this show would be incredibly watchable if it came at a time when he wasn’t largely perceived as the swaggering poster boy for obnoxious bellendry.
2. Rick Stein’s Road to Mexico, BBC Two
Usually, this would be flat last. Usually, Rick Stein’s culinary travelogues are unbearable because all he ever does is visit a well-known tourist trap, patronise the locals senseless and then complain because Britain doesn’t have the exact same customs as wherever he happens to be. However – and this might be down to his age, or down to my own ludicrous tendency to project – Road to Mexico is actually quite sweet. Stein seems less like an ugly foreigner here and more a man slightly adrift in the world. When he talks about visiting San Francisco after the summer of love because he heard a radio discussion about burritos, or when he says “no problemo” immediately after arriving in Mexico, his benign Alan Partridge tendencies come into focus like never before. It absolutely isn’t perfect, but it’s an improvement.
1. Nigella Lawson: At My Table, BBC Two
At My Table isn’t just a good Nigella Lawson series; I’d argue it’s the defining Nigella Lawson series. She has been on television for almost 20 years, and now she has relaxed into herself like never before. She’s no longer constrained by the infantilising “totty” tag that followed her around for years, plus she has given up her irksome tendency to look normal by riding around on a hired bus full of extras. Now she’s free to be who you suspect she’s always been; a dotty posho who is just as likely to plonk herself on the stairs in her nightie and tell you some mad story about something a woman screamed at her in hospital as cook any actual food. This new persona suits her. I hope it stays.
