Help, help. I’ve come down with a bad case of MasterChefitis!
You will know you have MasterChefitis when you can only speak in MasterChef-speak, and it can happen if you watch too much MasterChef, and I watched all of it. The heats. The knock-out rounds.
Those boring stretches in the professional kitchens.
The critics, pretending they know something we don’t, and saying things like ‘this dish harmonises really well’ whereas anyone can say that. (‘This dish harmonises really well’; there, proved it.)
Anyway, I knew I had caught MasterChefitis when I woke up the morning after the final and turned to my husband and said, in the manner of Gregg, the shouty bald one: ‘YOU’VE GOT SOME BIG FLAVOURS, BOY!’ And: ‘I COULD STICK MY FACE IN THAT!’
‘Oh no,’ said my husband, you have MasterChefitis again.
‘BUT IS IT FINE DINING?’ I added in the manner of John, the other shouty one, who has hair.
‘I can’t bear it,’ my husband said.
‘I’m sorry,’ I then had to say, ‘but you are the one who will be leaving this week.’
At this, my husband left the bedroom, and although I don’t know exactly what he was doing out on the landing, I bet he was saying he had no regrets, had learned a great deal, and had been glad of the journey even though, in truth, he was probably desperate for the cameras to go away so he could sob and rail and bash his head against one of those steel lockers.
As consolingly as I could, I did shout out after him: ‘COOKING DOESN’T GET TOUGHER THAN THIS!’ even though I’m aware it’s not true.
Say you were in a collapsing mineshaft, with leprosy, and your nose was falling off, and a toe, and a knee, yet you still had to rustle up a restaurant-standard meal that displayed flair, coherence, an understanding of (BIG!) flavours and spot-on seasoning?
That would be tougher, surely.
Still, now it’s over, I do expect my symptoms to ease although with The Apprentice on the way, who is to say I won’t come down with Apprenticitis?
And that is tiring. Because you have to give 140 per cent. And sell your granny, and sometimes your granny doesn’t want to be sold, and will hang on to you for dear life.
As it happens, I gave Vicious all I had, in terms of willing it to be funny – be funny!, be funny!, be funny! – but it so wasn’t enough.
This stars Ian McKellen, Derek Jacobi and Frances de la Tour and once such a cast arrives on board there has to be a feeling it’s going to be all right, whatever, although I can think of quite a few instances in which it wouldn’t be all right. Say the three were asked to pilot a plane.
Disaster! Or perform open-heart surgery? Disaster! Vicious is not a disaster, yet – early days and all that – but it’s not looking good.
I laughed once, I think. And my Sitcom-ometer (available from Argos) has to register five full laughs before any comedy can claim to be doing the business. It’s just the way it is. Read the instructions. They’re on the back of the box.
McKellen and Jacobi play Freddie and Stuart, a gay couple who have been together for nearly 50 years, while De la Tour plays their straight friend, Violet.
It seems to be a rule for on-screen gay couples that they must have a single straight friend, just as it seems to be a rule for on-screen straight couples to have a single gay friend, or what will happen?
The world will stop turning, I suppose. The first episode opened with Stuart camply squawking down a phone: ‘Oh my god! Oh, how dreadful!’ and it was camp squawking from there on in. Plus flouncing. But camp squawking, mostly.
Greggs: More Than Meats The Pie is one of those programme ideas that makes me think 'genius' yet also makes me want to shoot myself in the headWith its combination of old age and homosexuality, there was a sense of ITV breaking new ground with this, although I felt any broken ground filling itself back in once it had been established that Freddie and Stuart were as pathetically stereotyped as John Inman and Larry Grayson had ever been.
Freddie and Stuart are vain, bitchy, hysterical and so absurdly predatory that poor Ash from the flat upstairs didn’t know where to look, even though he kept popping in.
Why, Ash, why? What is your reason for all this popping in?
Meanwhile, Frances de la Tour’s character hasn’t progressed from Miss Jones in Rising Damp, and as for the acting… Oh my, the acting.
There was so much acting it flattened me against the wall. I am only just beginning to unpeel myself.
More from Deborah Ross Event... DEBORAH ROSS: The end of Western civilisation? I love it 22/05/13 DEBORAH ROSS: You'd be a fool not to fall for The Fall 15/05/13 DEBORAH ROSS: Oh Lordy... save me from Apprenticitis 08/05/13 DEBORAH ROSS: Half woman. Half fringe. 100 per cent rip-off 24/04/13 DEBORAH ROSS: Help! My flashbacks are having flashbacks 18/04/13 DEBORAH ROSS: Highbrow art... and lowlife tat 12/04/13 VIEW FULL ARCHIVESo, onto Greggs: More Than Meats The Pie, an eight-part pie-on-the-wall (anyone can make a bad pun, just proved it) documentary series about the bakery chain as it undergoes a revamp.
This is one of those programme ideas that makes me think ‘genius’ yet also makes me want to shoot myself in the head.
Yes, it’s a prolonged advert but, still, I rather loved it. It’s like a spoof, even if it isn’t a spoof.
There’s Nicola, who burst into happy tears when she heard her branch was getting a deli, and Big John, head of product development, whose greatest dream is to introduce a chicken and egg sandwich so he can call it ‘The Mother And Son Reunion Sandwich’, and then there is Claudette.
Claudette, who works behind the counter, complained endlessly about the uniform which, she explained, simply doesn’t have enough stretch for all the to-ing and fro-ing she has to do. Greggs and exercise.
Don’t really get each other, do they? Smashing.
