meemalee

2011 saw a brave new world as MasterChef (aka MehsterChef ) copied its Australian counterpart by installing a fancy piece of topiary and dragging out the already interminable extravaganza by showing us the previously untelevised audition stages. Hopefuls prepared their top dish to win a place in the final 20 (twenty!), but the series began with a whimper as the best part of the show - the Invention Test - seemed to have been consigned to history. Where's the fun in watching people make the one dish they know by heart? Where's the creativity, the ingenuity? Worse was the bizarrely humiliating format, as they were forced to wheel a tea-trolley of comestibles onto a stage and turn tricks for the gurning Gregg Wallace and John Torode. Hopes crushed, unsuccessful contenders wheeled their trolleys back off again under the eyes of their disappointed loved ones. After two episodes of X-FactorChef, I got fed up and turned off - even the gruesome twosome blind-folding contestants and m...

Claire, David, John FACT – I watched about 4 episodes of MasterChef the Professionals this year (including the one with " 39 Year Old Lee " and the one where cocky Kevin threw a wobbly). FACT – That means I’m probably not qualified to review it. FACT – That’s not going to stop me. Our three finalists are Claire Lara, a tutor at Liverpool Community College; John Calton, chef at the Duke of Wellington pub, in Newton, Northumberland and Dave Coulson, chef at the Eden Castle Inn in Hartlepool. They’re all Northern. One of them will win. Backstory time! Some kind of MOR dross (Keane?) plays as we find ourselves in Liverpool to discover that Clare grew up on a beach with a postman who fed her on oven chips. Suddenly Air plays, filling me with intense deja vu , but it all makes sense, as next she did a YTS which sent her to Paris for five years (long freaking youth training scheme), and fell for a French chef called Marc who thought her an oddball, but married her anyway. She now t...