There was a tricky question from Gordon Ramsay on BBC1 last night: “Would you sit on a thistle?”
Well, Gordon. Depends. If the other option is being forced to watch the rest of the second series of Future Food Stars I’ll happily plant my bare backside on a whole thicket of the prickly blighters.
I mean, I can kind of see why the BBC decided that the most underwhelming series of The Apprentice ever should be succeeded a week later by another series of the most underwhelming rip-off of The Apprentice ever.
Perhaps they were hoping that no viewers would notice that Lord Sugar had suddenly morphed into Lord Sugar Tits, and that they’d be able to burn off most of the series while everyone was preoccupied with Easter.
There was certainly an air of “sod it, it’ll do” to proceedings. Last year macho man Ramsay announced his arrival by hanging off of a helicopter off the Cornish coast and plunging into the choppy waters.
This time around? He simply rode leather-clad through the gates of a Scottish castle on a motorbike, looking like he was trying to recreate the opening credits of The Antiques Roadshow minus the sidecar and 1930s dummy.
As curtain-raisers go it didn’t exactly scream high octane, so I guess we should give him some points for honesty. Because what followed was definitely running low on gas.
A bunch of contestants whose business ideas are clearly never going to take over the world (told you it was like The Apprentice) competed in some fairly mundane tasks (ditto) in order to win Ramsay’s favour and money (ditto again).
The only drama came when one of the cooks absolutely torched the beef joints on the barbecue.
I was really hoping he had simply misunderstood Ramsay’s instruction to give the banqueters “a Michelin experience”, and had duly tried to turn the beef into a spare tyre.
Sadly not.
I had to make my own fun instead. This mainly involved noting down Ramsay’s quotes and imagining he was writing this review for me.
A clear winner soon emerged, which scored points for succinctness and truthfulness and also bore Ramsay’s sweary trademark: “It’s a s**t show.”
Sure is. Next level s**t show, chef.
