MasterChef is like a virus or a scarab beetle; it gets under your skin and eats your brain. As a programme which is, essentially, a blend of shows like River Cottage, Come Dine with Me and the X Factor, it combines the most basic primal instincts of the human race, the love of competition and food, which perhaps explains how it has earnt its 9pm mid-week slot on BBC 1. But at the same time as being great entertainment, MasterChef has to be one of the most annoying programmes ever. The fact that Swede Mason was able to make probably the catchiest remix of all time using Gregg Wallace and John Torone’s commentary is a tribute to how repetitive, distracting and D&B orientated the programme often is.
The music is irritating. Before you’ve even got to the taste test, you’re subtly head banging or leg wobbling in time to the chopping of onions and the turning on of blenders. If the music wasn’t enough, Gregg and John also have some of the most irritating stock phrases, comments and catchphrases ever heard on a cookery show. “Green peppers or red tomatoes?” was bad enough when Ainsley said it. “Cooking doesn’t get tougher than this”, “we need to see something special, Greg” and “WHERE’ZAT SAWCE?” often make me wonder whether John and Gregg aren’t just robots or gluttons picked off the street at random (respectively). Irritation reaches its zenith with the actual contestants themselves. It seems that enjoying something is never enough for competitive programmes. If you’re not gushing about “passion”, changing your life or how your harrowing and abusive childhood means you deserve to win a talent show, you get nowhere. If anyone has chosen to watch MasterChef, Strictly or Britain’s Got Talent, I think you can safely say that they’ve done so to see some cooking, some dancing and some talent rather than a lengthy interview with a plasterer from Wakefield whose trying to escape his marital problems by entering a competition. Call me callous, but if I wanted that, I’d watch Jeremy Kyle.
Having had enough of these aspects of the programme, I now wait for MasterChef to come on BBC iPlayer so I can skip the lengthy introduction, interviews and commentary to watch some actual cooking with glazed eyes. Sometimes I don’t even wait to see who gets evicted, so little do I care about the actual concept of the MasterChef competition. When you cut through the bullshit, MasterChef does have some fantastically redeeming factors. The food usually has me chewing my own hand without realising. The styles and techniques of cooking on display fill a yawning void in the food broadcasting market, and are a refreshing release from the smug self satisfaction and “easy home cooking” of personalities like Jamie and Nigel(la). The fact that it shows normal people with a real talent for all things culinary I also think is a great thing, not just because it breaks the monopoly of celebrity chefs, but also because it moves away from the idea that all home cooking has to be easy or one-pot or something that can be turned in to bubble and squeak later on in the week. Never made a ballotine of chicken or a port reduction? Now is your chance.
The last thing I’d want to do is criticise John, Gregg and the MasterChef team. Gregg’s unpretentious revelry in food is heartwarming and it is good to see a talented person discovered and recognised. It’s just the delivery, Prodigy soundtracks and creeping feeling that the programme is just as much about a sob-story that is to its detriment. Contrary to popular belief, I believe that sometimes cooking does get tougher than feeding hungry Gregg Wallace. Running one’s own restaurant, for example.
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