As with many refined gentlemen, I like to watch masterchef. It’s a great show because you get to see people who have no expectaion of themselves do remarkably well, and see overconfident people get crushed into the ground on day 1.
I love the show but it’s never one that I set time aside for. It’s always something that I catch while my parents have it on and then dedicate the following hour to seeing which of the conjured up meals I’d enjoy eating the most and praying that the one that I dislike gets kicked out that week.
Because that’s how any competition show goes, you have one that you love and one that you hate, and there need not even be any reason for who goes in what category. In Celebrity masterchef I tend to choose one of the 3/30 contestants I actually recognise.
I remember when I’d watch the show more religiously, I saw that half the celebrities were just friends of actually famous people, which I half liked and half didn’t. Half didn’t because it felt like a bit of an undermining of what the word “celebrity” meant, and my inner grammar nazi started having to breathe into a paper bag to calm down. I half liked it though because it meant that if I ever wanted a chance to go on masterchef, my odds went up with every acquaintence I vaguely kept in touch with.
Another reason I love masterchef is how desperately they try to only be positive about the food in later rounds. Someone could hand over a turd on a plate and John and Greg would stand there saying how dedicated the contestant was and tough it was to make.
You pick up that they start calling the shit food “unique” and “creative”, or complementing the chef instead of the food when there was almost nothing good to say about it. They have to do this because they want some tension when theres only one person to eliminate and if they ate it, looked at the contestant and sighed then it wouldn’t be the most tense of endings.
Of course when this happens, the seasoned viewers, the veterans, the ones who remember the days when Michel Roux Jr. hosted Masterchef: The Professionals, can point out who’s going out immediately. They know too, you can tell because the people behind the camera will tell them to talk about how they hope they’ll just get a second chance – a little cruel in my opinion – but they always ask for a “second chance” because everyone in the building knows damn well they screwed up this chance.
I often wonder if the people who know they did really well, when asked to downplay their chances of getting through for tension, think about saying, “well sure there’s a chance I won’t get through, but it got a lot lower when so-and-so took their food up to the pass!”
Though I love the highs and lows of Masterchef, one show that I feel got a lot worse was Bake off. I used to love it, and it inspired me to do plenty of baking on my own, but after it got dropped by the BBC and then picked up by Channel 4, it feels like something’s missing. I don’t have any real investment in it now, and find myself getting irrationally angry at the most pointless things – something I find easy to write about and so a common theme on this blog as you’ll notice.
The most recent episode I watched started with a massive star-wars sketch. Why? What’s wrong with some silly conversation or a shite poem to make you sigh deeply and then move on with the lighthearted fun? It’s like they’re trying way to hard to capture the happiness and joy of bygone years, a common theme in this country as you’ll notice.
You see Prue dressed as Leah with bagels on her head, and Paul Hollywood – the final relic of the shows yesteryears – dressed as “Darth Baker”, and it tires me. Makes me wish for a time when it was just Mel and Sue chatting nonesense in a field and some nice looking bread in the background.
I suppose Bake Off is one of those shows that I’ve outgrown, like many from my childhood. That’s an experience all of us get eventually, it’s something that while it makes us feel old, but we’re not allowed to mention that it makes us feel old, because we’re about 20 and it makes our 50 year old parents want to smack us.