Good riddance to ‘chop and chat' TV cookery shows

Telegraph

4 days ago

In news that will come as a blow to the makers of improbably large kitchen islands, chopping board salesmen and Le Creuset, it looks as though the sun is setting on cookery programmes.
A new piece of analysis by Broadcast Intelligence, an industry magazine, has found that only 12 cookery shows have been ordered this year, down from 42 last year and a remarkable high of 100 in 2019.
No doubt this is in part down to the recent inferno of scandal, disgrace and other malfeasance that has engulfed some of our best loved telly chefs.
I am no expert in PR, but when you have to appear on the front page of The Sun to say 'I'm not a groper, sex-pest or flasher,' as Gregg Wallace did the other day, the gig is up. Same for John Torode, who seemingly couldn't get through MasterChef without letting his hair down with a few racial slurs.
Then there's Gino D'Acampo, who denied a raft of allegations of inappropriate behaviour earlier this year.
Restaurant kitchens are shockingly civilised these days, compared to the Hell's Kitchens of popular imagination.
It's the TV kitchens that you need to watch out for. In this climate, producers can be forgiven for not wanting to touch cooking programmes with a 10ft breadstick. You might think you are making a harmless guide to French classics; in fact you are creating a crucible of racism and sexual misdemeanour.
The more boring reason for the decline in cookery programmes, however, is that they are simply out of time in 2025. They have been one of the richest traditions in British broadcasting, so much so they can all be identified instantly by a single first name, like a great Brazilian football team: from Fanny to Delia to Keith to Ainsley to Nigella to Nigel to Jamie to Rick to Nadiya.
But these series have only incidentally been about learning to cook, which is part of the reason the rise in time spent watching cookery programmes coincided with a decline in cooking at home. At their best these series have been an opportunity to spend time with charismatic and amusing people: presenters, guests, stressed contestants.
On holiday in Europe there is always a moment when I, like every self-respecting Englishman, briefly feel like Rick Stein, and it is not when I am in the kitchen. It's when I am wandering through a market in a blue linen shirt, picking up a tomato I may or may not buy.
Today there is simply too much competition, thanks in part to the deluge of TV commissions but mostly to social media. All the old qualities of cooking programmes are available online, but ramped up. If you are serious about learning to cook, there are crazily detailed, expert films available on every facet of every cuisine to be found on YouTube and Instagram, short and snappy and proven in the lacerating competition for online attention.
You can cook along to your phone far more easily than you could to the television, pausing and rewinding and skipping forward at will.
Who needs Jamie Oliver when you can watch a man in rural Japan hand-carving a noodle? As Rick Stein knows too well, the market takes no prisoners.