How to fix MasterChef

Spectator

6 days ago

In retrospect, as has so often been the case with my attempts at Delia's thrice-baked goat's cheese soufflé, the question was not so much when MasterChef was going to collapse, but how.
The warning signs were there. Not only in 2001 when Lloyd Grosman, Britain's answer to Paul Newman (in pasta sauce endorsement terms if not acting), flounced off the show because, so far as I understand the dispute, a revamp dictated that contestants all use the same ingredient. But also in 2018, when now disgraced judges Gregg Wallace and John Torode managed to unify the whole of Malaysia in affront. For which feat, whatever their later sins, I salute them.
It was episode 13 of series 14 and Malaysian-born contestant Zaleha Olpin presented her beloved childhood favourite chicken rendang recipe, served with a side of nasi lemak, only for Wallace to complain the chicken was not crispy enough and for Torode to call the dish a mistake. Typical Malaysian response? 'As a Malaysian, if I could, I would personally go to the show and rendang their head,' wrote Jin Wee in the Star, a Malaysian newspaper, adding superbly: 'Uncultured swine, doesn't know variety of cuisine and claims to be MasterChef?'
As anyone who does know their rendang would tell the judges, its chicken isn't meant to be crispy. A former Malaysian premier complained Wallace had confused his nation's cuisine with KFC. The only winner in the dispute was the English language which gained a new verb, though beyond a slightly sinister aura it's hard to know what 'to rendang' means.
That's the problem: everyone's a critic and everybody involved has a very thin skin, and is apt to explode at any moment. Torode made matters worse by tweeting something emollient and ending his message with a cheery 'Namaste'. Didn't he realise that namaste is not a fitting Malaysian farewell, fumed naysayers? Some 9,000 signatures supported a change.com petition calling on him to apologise. Which, unless I've lost my mind and without wanting to make 9,000 enemies, is some loony woke nonsense.
And yet the debacle points up how fraught televised cookery is and how it risks becoming a lethal cocktail of chippy keyboard warriors facing off against the kind of unexamined man babies who, insanely, have been given access to the knife drawer. That purported genius chef from The Bear who locked himself in the walk-in fridge to have a nervous breakdown on his restaurant's opening night and Ralph Fiennes poisoning anyone who ever crossed him in The Menu are the leading exemplars of the latter. And those are just kitchen fictions. As we know from Gordon Ramsay, reality TV is apt to be a yet more harrowing chip pan fire of the vanities than its fictional counterparts.
But the broader point is this: Britain is a country that, if one made a compilation of its best culinary moments, would definitely begin with King Alfred burning the cakes and might well end with Gregg Wallace telling social media that the only people outraged by his propensity to drop his trousers backstage to present onlookers with his signature dish of sorpresa all porca were middle class women with humanities degrees from Russell Group universities who don't appreciate what, looked at objectively, was just proletarian high jinks – so far as I understand his apology to the complaints of more than 50 women involved on the show.
It is a miracle that a nation so infamous for its cuisine has been such a tastemaker for so long. And yet it has: in 2017 the Guinness Book of Records officially recognised MasterChef as the most successful television cookery format. MasterChef is one of this post-industrial nation's most successful export products, filmed in 50 countries and broadcast in 200 territories, with many formats of which the Brazilian variant MasterChef: Para Tudo (MasterChef: Stop Everything) sounds most exciting.
MasterChef's origin story takes us back to 1990, when clever producers created it as the spawn of Mastermind if less cerebral, and sibling of Angela Rippon's Masterteam but less collaborative. If only Dame Angela had been recruited as host, none of this nonsense of recent weeks on MasterChef would have happened. There would have been no Wallace ascribing his sexual misconduct to autism, and no Torode preparing a defence for his sacking over alleged racist remarks, to damage the brand. Plus the former newsreader could have high-kicked her way through the longueurs of food preparation, which would have got my vote. Who wants to watch people from Daventry stir gravy on telly eyed by these two, Wallace with his grin as mirthless as de Niro's and Torode, like the Assyrian king in Delacroix's The Death of Sardanapalus, dead eyed and sated from excess of, in his case, competitively cooked cuisine? That's not jeopardy. That's telly tedium. But then I didn't understand the appeal of Friends either.
What happens next? Can MasterChef be put together again? That's not how Humpty Dumpty nor soufflés work. True, critic and occasional judge Grace Dent was astutely hired last year to replace Wallace during investigations into his misconduct. With her lovely regional accent and long association with the show, she is the right person to detox the brand.
And what of the most recent unbroadcast series? All those contestants denied their moments of prime time fame? It's possible they might have a case to sue for denial of self-publicity and loss of projected future income attendant thereon, though I'm no lawyer. Perhaps only many years hence, like Bob Dylan's the Basement Tapes or those Bruce Springsteen albums now coming to light, will the time be right to release the last series to an expectant public.
Dent would need a co-host, ideally one with culinary moves. I recommend communist Moral Maze contributor Ash Sarkar whose recipe for fish finger bhorta was championed by no less a domestic goddess than Nigella Lawson. Neither Dent nor Sarkar, I'll wager, would get caught with their trousers down in the green room or alienate whole countries. And one final change to detoxify MasterChef: the name, with all the unacceptable patriarchal connotations of its prefix, must go even if the format remains the same. My suggestion? Dinner Ladies, with Grace and Ash. You know you'd watch it.