Photograph: Studio Ramsay/BBC
I like Gordon Ramsay, even (especially? Something to interrogate in therapy, perhaps) when he’s yelling. The beauty of Ramsay is he is capable of dialling the self-mythologising machismo up and down at will, depending on the shape of the show around him. So in Hell’s Kitchen, he was consistently history’s worst ever bastard. In MasterChef Junior, he was oddly delicate and encouraging. In The F Word, he’s all staccato sentences while chain-making beef wellington in a bizarre, “Why are you bothering me at home?” approach to hospitality. And in Kitchen Nightmares, he is at his best, a laser-focused problem-solver who goes ego-to-ego with failed head chef after failed head chef, making people cry the bad way at the start of every show – and the good way by the end.
So the question ahead of Gordon Ramsay’s Future Food Stars (Thursday, 9pm, BBC One), which is just The Apprentice but for food entrepreneurs, is: which Gordon Ramsay is going to turn up? The raging beast or the quizshow host? The Michelin star ambitionist or the bloke who keeps doing pranks where he wears prosthetics? Well, how to put this: in his entrance into this show, he jumps out of a helicopter into the sea.
