Masterchef...

In the old days Masterchef was perfect Sunday afternoon telly.

There was speccy Loyd Grossman and his glottoral rape of every vowel in the English language as the host, plus a guest chef who’d come in and judge the three contestants all keen to show off their culinary skills. Each show would have a winner and the series would end with a final where somebody would win a glass bowl or some nice crystal decanter.

They even used the same format to have specials where horribly precocious kids called Tarquin or Jemimah would demonstrate their skills with a soufflé and explain how ‘Mummy and daddy simply adored their strawberry jous’. It’s true that you probably wanted to throat punch the kids involved to death while their restrained parents watched on helplessly but it was a more innocent time and it was nice telly.

But those days are long gone. Oh yes-sir-eee…

The current run of Masterchef has been going on for what seems like an eternity and instead of one little show on a Sunday afternoon just before you turn over for Bullseye the BBC have realised they have a ‘brand work horse’ and are subsequently flogging that horse to within an inch of its life.

Now it’s on for 30 minutes Monday to Wednesday with an hour show on Thursday and instead of Lloyd Grossman we now have acclaimed chef John Torode (a sort of Richard Parks with better hair) and Gregg Wallace (who resembles what Phil Mitchell’s gay academic brother should look like).

To create added spice they’ve also changed the format. It used to just about three people cooking but now each heat starts with six contestants who all whip up an opening dish from previously unseen ingredients. Three wannabes are dumped out at this stage while the three who made it through are sent off to work in a professional kitchen before coming back to create a two-course meal with the winner making the final show on Thursday.

The final 30 minutes of the Thursday show sees that week’s four heat winners battle it out for a place in the semi-finals. But it’s not just based on cooking. Oh, no. Torode and Wallace grill the remaining quartet in what’s called a Passion Test where they have to identify several ingredients then tell the hosting duo why they love cooking so much. It’s supposed to be a chance for them to show how they feel about food but it really amounts to begging on TV in the hope they’ll get through to the next round. It’s an irksome bit of the show.

I can’t decide whether the new Masterchef is really good or really awful. Torode can be a right grumpy old bugger and Wallace, a grocer by trade, plays the cockney barrow boy so much that you often want to take a meat skewer and drive it through one ear and out of the other just to see if he’ start talking like a normal person.

What I do know, however, is that in its new format the BBC have made it into a long and drawn-out affair and by my calculations the current series will end some time in 2023. By which time Wallace will be presenting the show round the old Joanna dressed in a pearly king costume while Torode is dressed in a toga and feeds him jellied eels.

It’s how it ends in my head…