I am a self-confessed television snob. My favourite shows are Mad Men, The Wire and Arrested Development. However, I do have one guilty secret: cookery shows. Anything with cooking, and you can bet I’ve seen it. The God of all TV cookery shows is of course Come Dine With Me.
The premise of the show is simple – five people cook dinner for each other over the course of a week. The guests mark the host after each meal and then, the following day, move on to the next house. The contestant with the highest score at the end of the week wins £1,000. My friends and I have actually seen all the episodes. My friend Lois even recognized someone in an episode from about three years ago on a bus, and could tell me all about the episode she was in. Though the idea is simple, it is one of the funniest shows on television at the moment. It’s amazing that there have been so many good moments on it that have come out of nowhere, such as a snake crapping on the table, drag queens and an ever present belly dancer.
Celebrity Come Dine with Me is also over-the-top brilliant and is like a special treat. This version also provides us with some surreal yet amazing moments involving celebrities. Peter Stringfellow’s sink collapsing or Jan Leeming flirting with David Spinx are some of my favourites to date. It is also the anomaly of all celebrity reality TV shows, the longer it goes on, the better the guests are getting, which is something to be treasured.
The trouble is that my obsession doesn’t end there; it just continues to the other granddaddy of TV cookery shows: MasterChef. Members of the public compete with each other through various rounds to be crowned the one and only MasterChef. There’s nothing better when eating your breakfast than to watch some random people panicking about the dish they’ve made and then looking like they’re about to cry when Greg tells them it has too much salt! It has all the best elements of a competition-based show. John and Greg are brilliant hosts; their presenting skills extend to randomly shouting things like ‘cooking doesn’t get much better than this’ and then eating amazingly large spoonfuls of whatever food is on offer as though they have been starved for a week before filming.
I may love The Wire but I’d happily sit through Brummies eating sushi off a worryingly hairy man any day!
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