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.
No, I don’t know why Gordon Ramsay is jumping out of a helicopter into the sea. Neither do any of the assembled food entrepreneurs (lockdown salmon-smokers and farmers’ market jam-makers, mostly). Gordon barks at them out of a wetsuit while dripping into the sand at Newquay, explaining the show (a £150,000 investment as the grand prize; each week, a “challenge” to “test their mettle”; a grave promise that it’s going to be tough). Eventually, finally, we get some explanation: just as Gordon has “made a leap of faith for them”, so they have to make a leap of faith for him. They all have to put wetsuits on and jump in the sea. Why aren’t they cooking? Why is a pre-requirement for this cooking competition the ability to swim 500m through open water then scramble over some rocks? We are 15 minutes in and nobody has touched a single pan. I am starting to fear Future Food Stars is less a TV cooking competition and more a hyper-produced and very belated Gordon Ramsay stag do.
It warms up from there. If you’re an Apprentice fan (I am, even – especially? – when Alan Sugar is yelling at someone), the vague format will be familiar to you: it’s like the food challenge week from The Apprentice, but every week. Contestants are split into teams and after a profit task reveals the losing team, they are asked to tell on each other to identify the point of failure. Gordon gathers them all into a room in businesswear. One person gets pointed at with a significant finger and sent home. You know, like The Apprentice.
Although, I have to say it’s The Apprentice if The Apprentice were conceived in 2022: contestants are actually allowed to communicate with each other, and conduct mild market research, and at no point are they forced to act and star in their own terrible TV adverts. Week one sees three teams compete to see who can sell the most food from a stall on a Newquay beach, and obviously a lot goes wrong – a late change in the line-cook responsibilities almost leads to war; someone genuinely cries over a taco; a lot of mango dressing ends up on the floor – but there are successful moments, too. While the teams cook, Ramsay goes around Newquay highlighting the local food scene. It’s exactly what this show should be doing, and it does it well. I’m still thinking about the helicopter (why? Why?) but the subsequent 45 minutes really make up for it.
There are teething problems – as with any first-series show, it has to find its tone, and contestants never quite know if they are meant to be fighting (I suppose their adrenaline is still pumping from the cliff dive) or getting along – an argument about a mushroom threatens to derail the entire first episode in its out-of-nowhere ferocity, and a squabble about monkfish really makes you want to go: “Guys, guys, it’s just TV.” But there’s a germ of a very, very good show here, as soon as Gordon Ramsay stops jumping out of things and just hosts it. Maybe this will lead to 15 more series and an American spin-off that eventually changes world politics for ever! Or maybe this will lead to a terrible accident that changes how TV stunts are conducted for the rest of time! I am excited to see which of the two it is.
