X Factor For Foodies

And so once again, I have been suckled unto the breast of Reality TV masquerading as documentertaintment. The culprit; Masterchef.

It started in the 90s with a boring old man with a boring old voice, showcasing boring people cooking boring food, interspersed with boring chatter from other boring people. Unfortunately, it became apparent that viewers could only tolerate such boredom for eleven years, leading to the programme vanishing into the ether of non-existence.

Some years later, it got revived by an Australian man and a baked potato in glasses. Somehow, they managed to take the boring old show and make it new and mad, giving contenders twenty-seven different tasks including: making a two course meal with a maximum of four ingredients, working for three hours in a real high-class restaurant and flambéing a watermelon until it reaches the correct consistency akin to a SmartPrice jaffa cake. Naturally, viewing figures steadily rose (...probably. I don't have any actual evidence for this, but since I'm going somewhere with it you might as well just take it as given for now and argue with me later).

Leading us to this year. And keeping with mainstream trends, the show's gone all upmarket and wham-bam-pizzazz on yo asses. Gone are the heats of contestants you'd see once every three weeks as they rotated and ultimately progressed further on. Now the show follows a much more simple linear style of taking on a shitload of amateur cooks, only to tell 95% of them to fuck right off, and for those lucky few (twenty to be precise) to make it to the boot camp kitchen, only for another ten get the butcher's knife in the neck and the ten survivors get to live another day to cook for their lives. Within the first two or three episodes, they manage to cull a sizeable crowd to a mere handful, then allow the others to keep going and going until they inevitably get picked off one by one over the course of the rest of the series. Ultimately, the whole thing ends up looking like the X Factor for foodies, except without the public involvement, the whooping crowd hollering over every vaguely positive comment and the face of Simon Cowell.

I suppose, to draw another parallel (since this is the BBC we're talking about), it's very similar to The Apprentice; a show which I found myself becoming a slave to over the course of my initially lonely months in Halls of Residence. Basically, we're shown the lives of people who want to "make it" in their chosen sector of careerdom and follow them as they undertake increasingly brutal tasks that would force any normal person to throw their hands up in the air, scream, cry, swear, shout and shit all over the place and tell the masters of this cruel show of puppetry exactly where to go, leaving with as much dignity as they can muster from within themselves after all the torture they've been put through. Although, naturally, having cameras around makes all the difference.

The thing with it is, though, that up until now it hadn't quite dawned on me the cruel nature of what this programme has become. Yes, it deeply saddens me to admit, but I have been conned once again by "Reality TV" in believing that this was a simple cookery show (which is, quite frankly, a style of programme I enjoy watching [it puts me in the mood to cook and makes me feel like I can do it, so much so that if this whole writing jig never takes off I could seek solace in the kitchen of a greasy spoon {no I'm not doing the whole brackets thing again}]), when in fact it's been lying to me and feeding me the heart-warming, life-changing, "journeys" of the contestants (I must stress that the notions of contestants' journeys are now copyrighted by Simon Cowell, no infringment is intended by this mere, simpleton peasant of a blog post). Furthermore, it's done that thing where I feel even more competent than the people inside my tellybox, yelling at the bloke with a severed finger for not laying his tomato slices out properly and telling him I could do it better.

It only occured to me during tonight's episode, the vegetarian special, in which the only vegetarian competitor felt she could excel but was criticised by real people (by "real" people I mean people who aren't actually judging a televised competition, but merely passing comment on the food they've been given) on one single dish. This lead to a montage of upset-face, the scraping of uneaten food off plates and "I really thought this was my chance" soundbites... probably with Röyksopp playing in the background; I can't be too sure of the music. And the reason I don't remember the music, is because I was actually moved. I'd been drawn in, captivated by this woman's love of cooking and utter dismay at the idea of failure and the feeling of her life crashing around her into tiny pieces of circus tent. (Oh yeah, they were cooking for circus people inside a tent, did I not mention?) Anyway, it's not all bad. She made it through to next week's show in the end so life isn't one giant apocalytic chasm just yet.

Although this brings me onto the true realisation of the con-liness of the whole thing. All through the programme we'd been informed that, in a special double-elimination twist (trademark Cowell), two of the contenders would be washing pots and being banished into the realms of nowheredom once again. And so came the big reveal. One contestant down, another to face the chop. If I were a betting man (and if they actually took bets on the next Masterchef evictee within that little 30-second silence that comes after "the next person to leave the competition is...", which gets accompanied by a montage of slow-zooming shots of petrified looking faces), I would've thought the second person to go would've been the bloke who said "there's really no room for mistakes at this point" straight after he dropped a bowl of flour all over the floor making his shoe look like a snowy-capped mountain in the middle of a Christmas postcard. Unfortunately, however, he didn't get the boot, or the chop, or any other metaphorical device you can think of. Instead, we were told that since all the others had done a good job, they all get to stay on another week.

Now, I don't like Simon Cowell at the best of times, but at least whenever he calls a double-culling he sticks to it rather than use it as a device to ram the fear of God into people just so they can cook you some better food. (What actually happens to the food after the judges take a single bite of it, anyway? Is it divvied out between the rest of the production staff, or simply thrown out? Surely not in these times of Comic Relief we're in. Couldn't they just stick half an aubergine-stuffed haggis and a bowl of ravioli in a doggy-bag and ship it off to Ethiopia? I dunno!!)

So that, my friends, is how you turn the phrase "I just watched Masterchef" into over a thousand words. If only I could write that much this easily when it comes to actual work I should be doing.

All in all, however, not only has it managed to make me feel somewhat diminished that I have succumbed to the powers of "Reality TV" once more, but also (as is common whenever I watch any kind of cookery programme) I'm now stupidly hungry and have the overwhelming urge to cook something extravagant and beautiful to look at and a delight to eat. Problem is I'm still living on a student diet and, thus, the height of my extravangance amounts to instant noodles, two minutes in the microwave.

Besides, what five-star meal can you make from baked beans, corn flakes and half a rotting onion?