I found myself last week, for reasons inexplicable even to me, watching MasterChef Australia. For those accustomed to our sedate British affair, the Aussie counterpart was a revelation: a Revelation in the biblical sense, in that I had no idea what was going on, but nevertheless felt a distinct awareness that the world might be ending and that this might — under the circumstances — be a good thing.
The UK MasterChef has, of course, had its own troubles. Fresh from the Beeb’s night of the long knives, jettisoning Gregg Wallace after repeated incidents of sexual weirdness and John Torode after one incident of misguided karaoke, the show is back and trying to keep everyone’s hands where we can see them with the restaurant critic Grace Dent and the Irish chef Anna Haugh at the helm.
But before we get to that: the Aussies have just started a new series too. I watched the opening scenes, alarmed, as 20 amateur chefs were bombarded with inspirational speeches and Spielbergesque music, while the faces of former winners were projected on to a six-story building like some unholy combination of Nineteen Eighty-Four, A Clockwork Orange and Delia Smith’s Christmas. I swear, they had some of them in tears before anybody had so much as picked up a wooden spoon.
By the time they were in the kitchen — a good 10 to 15 minutes into proceedings — I became convinced I was hallucinating the whole thing. Instead of just having their onions ready on their work stations, the contestants had to engage in a sort of Supermarket Sweep-style raid of a communal stock cupboard. They had a crowd cheering from the balcony like the Colosseum in AD90.
I tell you all this because I think it’s important, as citizens of the world, to remind ourselves that there are people out there doing things very differently to us, then to affirm to ourselves that we are, of course, doing it better. MasterChef — in one format or another — has been round longer than I’ve been alive, and one is prone to getting complacent. But after my encounter with whatever it is the Aussies are up to down there, I have emerged with a new appreciation for our sweet little British version.
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Ah, how peaceful, after that Antipodean fever dream, to watch the chefs potter round, smearing out their purées like we are forever stuck in Mayfair in 2003, while the hosts smile like nursery teachers confronted with a particularly slow child and say things like: “It sounds like your passion for cooking may have come from your grandmother.”
Just once, once, I would like someone to say: “No, Grace, my grandmother was a cow. This dish does not remind me of my childhood and if “food is really important in my culture” it’s only because food is really important in every culture because everyone has to eat.” (The Dutch, by the way, are the one exception to this. No idea why. As anyone who has tried to get a decent meal in that country will tell you, they just don’t care about food, God bless ’em.)
Nonetheless, I’m feeling optimistic about this new series. I genuinely like the fact that we get the same characters, the same dramas every year. I find it very comforting. The only difference, of course, is the new hosts: Haugh in her chef whites and Dent done up like she’s off to Glyndebourne later. They are more continuity than change; a little less testosterone-heavy, perhaps, but the same mixture of kindly relative and threatening Mob boss.
My only concern is whether, as the competition hots up, these two will be able to whisk up the level of furious melodrama needed to persuade the audience that a botched poached egg is a historic catastrophe. Dent has it in her, I reckon. There’s a steeliness behind her eyes. Haugh seems too smiley. But let’s see.
The contestants, meanwhile, are as pleasingly wholesome as ever: my favourites are Jhané, a smiley young British-Caribbean lady, prone to producing fusion food whose warmth and comfort you can taste through the screen, and Matt, an IT teacher from Bradford who bakes his dog a birthday cake every year. The scandals of the past year gave the producers the opportunity to rip up this show and do something different. It seems they have looked that opportunity square in the face, and said no. Good for them.
Britain’s finest living comic novelist, Howard Jacobson, once proposed that the greatest horror in life is the sound of one’s wife laughing at somebody else’s writing. It would be not much different, he contends, to come downstairs to find her in flagrante with the bloke next door.
Last week, ten minutes into my daily gawping-at-the-screen duties, I heard perturbed muttering emerging from the next room, swiftly followed by the arrival of an equally perturbed husband. “What,” he harrumphed, “are you laughing at?”
I was laughing at Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat. Had the show’s creators, Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky, wandered into the living room at that point, we would have had a fight on our hands. I never laugh at television. Ever. Certainly not alone in a room. Yet by the end of episode one I had collapsed into giggles at least five times.
The premise of this show sounds rather cruel: every person you see on screen is an actor, apart from one. Crucially, this one person, Truman Show style, has no idea that this is the case. The location for the first series was a trial, the mark a member of the jury. The second series takes place on a corporate retreat for a small hot sauce business called Rockin’ Grandmas. The victim is Anthony Norman, a temp who thinks he has been hired for the week at a real company that happens to have a documentary crew following it.
I went into this show expecting something between a Derren Brown stunt, an episode of The Office, and a piece of Noughties reality TV nastiness. Company Retreat is none of these. It is silly, clever and quite astonishingly warm. The characters are lovingly absurd yet entirely real: a customer relations staffer who enthusiastically tells us that her coffee order is the same as Taylor Swift’s; a head of HR with the best of intentions and a foot constantly in his mouth; the dopey son of a boss, freshly returned from pursuing his dreams of rock stardom to take up the helm.
There is not a moment of cruelty in this show, least of all towards the lovely Norman, a man who must rate in the 99th percentile of agreeableness, perfectly happy to nod along as a motivational speaker blathers on extensively about his own testicles or as one colleague proposes to another, despite their never having been on a date.
Company Retreat is a remarkable feat of television: 3,600 hours of footage, 15 fully formed characters whom we need to believe have known each other for 20 years. But this is a moral, as well as a technical, masterpiece. I emerged from this show utterly uplifted, full of love for the magic of ordinary life. This show is well worth the upset your giggling will cause to your partner. Please watch it.
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