Dining Stars is no Winner

I love food, me. Show me a dog that doesn’t. In fact I have a deep mistrust of people that don’t really eat. You know, the ones what leave a bit of a food by the side of their plate and carry on talking for 20 minutes without so much as looking at it? What’s all that about? Eat it, you mug, it’s food? Or at least give it to me.

But while I may enjoy stuffing my boat race, I can’t for the life of me understand why every other programme on telly is about grub. Fair enough, there might be a need for a weekly recipe programme, preferably presented by someone saucy like Ching-He Huan, whisking eggs in something resembling a French maid’s outfit. But seriously, I can’t switch on the box nowadays without some muppet telling me how to avoid making a sunken raspberry souffle.

You’ve got Ready Steady Cook, Jamie’s Fowl Dinners’, Cookalong with Gordon, Ray Mears Northern Wilderness, Saturday Kitchen, Nigel Slater’s zzzzzzzzzzzzz. Fuck me, what ever happened to Dempsey and Makepeace. Or Fawlty Towers.

The latest trend for these culinary offerings is to bring famous people into the mix. Funnily enough, Dinner With Portillo is actually a good show, because Michael Portillo is an interesting man. He and his equally engaging guests don’t prattle on about the food, they just eat it, while discussing issues like whether or not drugs should be legalised or Scottish should be independent. But I’m guessing this BBC4 effort is a bit high brow for your average punter.

So instead mainstream TV has drugged us with Celebrity Masterchef, Celebrity Come Dine With Me and Dining Stars. How Dining Stars ever got passed for production defies belief, because firstly, it’s presented by Michael Winner, secondly, it involves this most pompous food critic being invited to Joe Bloggs’ house for dinner before ritually lambasting their cooking and gives them 0 stars for effort. And thirdly, erm, it’s presented by Michael Winner.

If you haven’t seen it, imagine the world’s most annoying permatan coming into your house and telling you that you can’t cook and that you should be a shamed you were ever born. In fact it’s no different from most of these other cookery shows, like Hell’s Kitchen, Masterchef and Ramsey’s Kitchen nightmares – which are ultimately all just exercises in ritual humiliation.

There’s nothing worse than seeing some self-anointed cookery expert publicly berate some Michel Roux wannabe for putting too much lemon zest in his raspberry soufflé. So you won’t find this mutt watching that dog’s dinner of a show or backing odds of 12/1 that ITV will commission a new series. It certainly ain’t no Winner.

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Tags: Article, Bo Dadogg, dining stars

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