John and Gregg seem to be becalmed, the challenges are uninspiring and the contestants are unappealing
Sometimes I wonder if I'm stuck in a kind of MasterChef vortex. First there was Loyd Grossman. Then there was John and Gregg bellowing and sucking their forks on BBC2. Next came the celebrities, the professionals and the juniors. Followed by the Australians, and their version of the UK show. And now? Now we're apparently watching the UK version of the Australian version of the UK update of the Loyd Grossman original, on primetime BBC1. Who knows where it will all end?
Or indeed who will still be watching? Because while previous incarnations of MasterChef might have been stuffed with ridiculous declarations, surplus rounds that appeared to have no bearing on the result, and more passion and determination than even Lord Sugar might think totally necessary, the show was rarely boring. This series, however, I'm finding it hard to summon up the energy to last a whole episode.
The problems started with the auditions. John cried in one of them. Nobody cooked a playdafoo that looked like a child had made it unsupervised, wearing a blindfold, while having a tantrum. John and Gregg didn't patrol the aisles rolling their eyes wildly and grimacing at anyone daring to experiment like they were actually going to be poisoned. Cocky competitors weren't totally shamed in front of each other.
Things haven't really improved since. The set seems to have quadrupled in size so that the competitors could feasibly source entirely different sets of local ingredients, and the invention test box has morphed into a whole deli. Worse are the challenges. Fair dos to Gregg for trying to ramp up the tension of cooking for a circus on Peckham Rye ? PECKHAM RYE! ? or making a buffet for the cast of Merlin ? THE CAST OF MERLIN! ? or just some students ? ERM STUDENTS! ? but why aren't the contestants doing more cooking in actual restaurants with actual chefs? That used to be most of the show, now it seems to be all field kitchens and mass catering.
Things got a little better on last night's show with the arrival of Michel Roux's croque-en-bouche and a trolleyload of cakes ? although it possibly wasn't entirely wise to draw parallels between flying for the RAF and making some sodding sandwiches, Gregg ? but I still feel that I'm seeing the series out to the bitter end, rather than actively enjoying it.
Even old Toorude and Gregg the Egg appear to have changed their ways. I have heard not one metallic basil; merely a sprinkle of deep, velvety, iron-rich descriptions; absolutely no threats to de-robe and dive into a pudding. Only one proper, ridiculous moment has lodged in my brain: John doing some kind of uber-camp panto hiss of "Don't bite off more than you can chew!" at Miss Swansea. Now that's why I watch MasterChef.
Instead we've had a few guest chefs to liven things up. But largely we've been meant to be caring about the contestants and their journeys and the challenges they've overcome. Sadly I haven't, and I don't. This year's contestants are largely oddly unappealing ? perhaps because they were whittled down to a final bunch astonishingly quickly. All I'm really interested in is their best two courses, which we get to see surprisingly infrequently.
It seems strange, really, that MasterChef Australia, from which the new UK show borrows heavily, can combine many of the same elements and come up trumps. But then it also does everything the British show does, just 50 times bigger. So the judges are more flamboyant, more ridiculous; the contestants live in a house together and vote each other off; they have cook-offs against real chefs; they cater amazing weddings on boats. Against that background, setting the whole thing in a vast, sunlit warehouse feels vaguely reasonable. On BBC1, it doesn't.
So: how are you getting on? Are you looking forward to the final couple of weeks in a state of slight outrage after this blog? Or have you lost interest already? And can anyone explain why, when MasterChef was on seemingly every night for increasingly idiosyncratic lengths of time, we all moaned it was too much, but now we have it once a week for an hour, it seems it's too little ? even though it's also completely boring? A quandary no?
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/tvandradioblog/2011/apr/14/masterchef-bbc-gregg-wallace
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