Gregg Wallace and John Torode are joined by Apprentice also-rans and Casualty cast-offs for more food-based escapism
I’m trying to think what there is new to say about Celebrity MasterChef (Wednesday, 9pm,
BBC One), a TV format as ancient as the earth beneath us, a weeknightly appointment where Gregg Wallace – a man with one of the most multifaceted energies alive: at once capable of sparking you out in one punch, cheerfully selling you an organically farmed sausage, marrying your friend’s quiet adult daughter and somehow buying your car off you for scrap – prowls around a test kitchen, vacuum-sealed into a waistcoat, raising his eyebrows at turbot. John Torode is there, too. You’ve got the narrator, you’ve got the trips to outside restaurants, you’ve got a high-pressure lunch service where someone panics at 60 scallops. You know what it is by now.
Although now it isn’t Celebrity MasterChef, not in the traditional sense. See, Celebrity MasterChef hasn’t changed but, and I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, the world has. Usually, big, bombastic, horn-section TV monoliths such as this start to falter around this stage in their run (we are 15 seasons in), the same beats that used to thrill now feeling tired; think The Apprentice after that series where Sugar fired three people in one week then went mad and declared two winners. There’s nowhere you can go from there. You just have to relive the same nightmare, again and again, push the rock up the hill then have it tumble inevitably down, until quiet cancellation.