What percentage of the public harbours dreams of being a cooking professional? It must be at 10%, 11%. Every day you are surrounded by them. Perhaps you work with a guy who is too into fermentation. A distant cousin spends every weekend laminating dough. How many people in your household dream of retiring at 50 and opening a gastropub? One? Two? Three? A stark fact: no one in this country doesn’t know someone who secretly harbours dreams of making something complex with hickory smoke for a table of three judges. And so, to try to meet that insatiable demand – Five Star Kitchen: Britain’s Next Great Chef (from Thursday), which is MasterChef but for Channel 4.
Well, it isn’t just MasterChef for Channel 4. It’s MasterChef: The Professionals – every participant in this knock-out hour-long cooking format is already working as a chef, be it private or restaurant owner – with a healthy dose of The Apprentice also (each contestant has to rock up to the show with a neat “restaurant concept” pitch: this isn’t just crab legs, it’s business too!). The prize is a restaurant inside the gilded Langham hotel in central London. The punishment is Michel Roux Jr will be your boss. To succeed you have to get through a series of challenges that mostly involve cooking breakfast to an unfeasibly high standard while someone shouts at you. This is TV that I watch and go: “I feel hungry. I’m going to have to have a snack.” But a broad segment of the population will watch this and go: “I’m going to finally buy that sous vide machine and get good at plating. In three years’ time I could win this.”
