Grace Dent swans through the swing doors in a velvet jumpsuit carrying pudding. I’m confused. Is this before or after she quit I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! to recover from the trauma of being exposed to Nigel Farage’s politics and bum in the jungle shower?
“Ciment au chocolat avec une crème anglaise rose,” says Dent to the diners. Do what now? No, not chocolate cement; she means brownies with pink custard. “Who doesn’t like pink custard?” says one diner. I don’t. I like my custard like I like my men – vanilla and poured over rhubarb crumble.
But these are no ordinary diners. They are former MasterChef champions whose task it is to decide which of five eminent food critics turned chefs deserves the stunningly disappointing trophy of a knife and fork. Which, as Jay Rayner says, would be worth winning to put in the downstairs loo. Or on eBay.
Co-host Gregg Wallace sets out the premise for this special. “They can dish it out. But can they dish it up?” Scriptwriter? We’ll be needing a scriptwriter! Much airtime is wasted on such putative bon mots. Like a duff restaurant that keeps the bread coming while the mains are being cocked-up backstage, it’s more filler than thriller.
“Five minutes more and I can take my bra off,” says Dent, disappearing through the swing doors into the kitchen.
The problem with food-related TV is that it is liable to give viewers dyspepsia. The jeopardy is unbearable. In The Bear, the head chef accidentally locks himself in the walk-in fridge leaving his minions to pony up the meals. In Boiling Point, chef Stephen Graham has a heart attack mid-service. Come Dine With Me weekly makes The Wicker Man seem like Play School. And then there was Ralph Fiennes trying to kill off his customers in The Menu.
What film and TV tell us is that kitchens are places where you are likely to deep-fry your hand or lose a finger. Here, three-fifths of the contestants look as though they are going home in an oxygen tent such are their stress levels. Will the garlic and dill butter from William Sitwell’s chicken kiev leak? Will Rayner’s glasses slide from his nose into the Sardinian fregula? Will Jimi Famurewa’s jollof rice make his watching mum, and by extension the whole of Nigeria, proud?
The compensation for viewers is that the portions of schadenfreude are huge. “I am literally putting a rake on the floor ready for it to hit me in the face,” says Sitwell. Mate, you’re not. You mean figuratively.
Leyla Kazim is hyperventilating after Wallace and John Torode give four thumbs up to her magarina bulli, a pasta dish from northern Cyprus involving grated halloumi. “The dried mint is extraordinary!” says Torode, who may have a low bar for finding things extraordinary. “That’s a corker of a dish,” says Wallace, proving that critics of critics need be no good as critics.
“It’s like,” sobs Kazim breathlessly as a piano strikes up obligatory minor-key arpeggios, “it’s part of my heritage … the fact that both of them found it … woooh! … I feel like the adrenaline and emotion has ebbed away from my body … I’m left like a shell.” It’s Gwyneth Paltrow’s Oscar speech 2.0.
The blubbing doesn’t stop there. Sitwell, who looks sensible enough to be the love-child of Patrick Vallance and Chris Whitty, wells up as he plates up his rabbit main. I’m not sure why. Possibly it’s because he specialises in making edible spheres with runny stuff inside. His chicken kiev, as we predicted, leaked. But would his self-saucing chocolate pudding leak too, in a good way? He serves the spheres to the diners then retreats, not knowing if, when cut open, a lovely chocolate sauce will flow forth, or congealed lumps of brown goo will ruin his chances. Incredible tension! I can’t bear to look!
The show’s chief takeaway (see what I did there – so sorry) is that Brendan Behan is wrong. Critics, the Irish writer charged, are like eunuchs. They know how it’s done but they can’t do it themselves. All five of these critics, pink custard notwithstanding, can do it. That’s more than you can say for TV critics: I couldn’t make a TV programme to save my life.
• MasterChef: Battle of the Critics was on BBC One and is available on iPlayer.
