As I may have mentioned previously I am not someone with a great interest in food. I could live for the rest of my life on nothing but bread, butter and cheese, with a couple of squares of chocolate thrown in for good behaviour on a Sunday, and not get bored with it. I am therefore an unlikely candidate for viewing Masterchef. Despite this, we watch it religiously.
And this is because of a thing which parents who are reading this will surely recognise. As your children grow up, they get interested in things, and because your children are interested in them you get drawn into them, willy nilly. Then the children grow out of stuff and get bored by it, but there you are, the ensnared parent, beached like a whale after the tide has gone out and still entranced by whatever it was that their flibbertygibbet minds have now abandoned. It is for this reason that we switch on the television for every Grand Prix of the F1 season. No matter that Son No 1, who first got us interested, left the parental home many years ago, and had actually lost most of his interest in racing cars several years before that. No matter that we can no longer be bothered to keep up with who the new drivers are and who Mark Webber eg is driving for this season. No matter even that the one and only racing driver I ever had any time for, the talented yet unassuming two time world champion Mikka Hakkinen retired years and years ago. We still switch it on and spend our Sunday afternoons listening to the constant drone of very fast cars going round and round a bendy track, while a couple of 'experts' tell us what is going on, as though we couldn't see it with our own eyes. At least I no longer have to put up with the biased screeching of the exciteable Murray Walker, a man whom I grew to loathe as passionately as you can loathe someone you have never met.
Mikka Hakkinen with former Maclaren team boss Ron Dennis, a man so brave he happily let it be known that his favourite colour is grey.
But this is to digress. It was however Son No 1, during one of his extended stays in Orkney, who also drew us into the culinary cauldron that is Masterchef and we've stayed with it; OH because he is quite interested in food and me because I like watching competitions that involve people who are quite good at something to start with improving as the weeks go on. Plus of course the rather more common pleasure of rooting for whoever becomes your favourite, and howling with laughter at some of the more - shall we be kind and say - amazing dishes.
We'd been looking forward to tonight's offering because clips had shown that not only were the last 4 competitors to be judged by the bullet headed greengrocer and the Antipodean restaurateur, but also by the humourless cooking Nazi that is Marcus Wareing. We knew it would be harsh; I don't think we realised quite how harsh it would be.
Would you dare cook for this man? Me neither!
Of the four semi-finalists we've had Larkin down for a while as a dead cert for winning the title eventually. Sarai [spelling?] lost me when she served up a dish recently in paper bags. We are too far through the competition for paper bags to impress. Nor has she yet cooked anything successfully that wasn't curry. However her first name may be spelled, her middle name is not versatility. We are divided on Natalie, as the OH finds her bossy and loud, while I think of her as someone who has taken the opportunity afforded her by the competition and has done some serious learning, with grace, humour and some really hard work. The fourth semi-finalist is Dale who has made little impression on us, except that we sort of vaguely remember he has cooked some nice food, although we would be hard pushed to call to mind any particular dish.
Natalie was a star. MW liked and praised both her dishes and she almost melted with pleasure and pride. I expect John and Greg said some kind things about her food too. When MW is commenting why should you care what anyone else is saying? Sarai had put the paper bag thing behind her and served up a rather nice looking soup. Presentation has previously been one of Sarai's blind spots so it was good to see that she was improving on that front. Her dessert was a massive pastry thing which looked very dry, but also quite pretty. She didn't do as well as Natalie but she still did OK.
And then we got to the boys and entered the territory of car crash TV. They both cooked razor clams, with disastrous results. When he tasted Dale's, MW asked for a glass of water. Dale hadn't cooked razor clams before and had only the vaguest idea of how to do it before getting stuck in. He now knows how not to do it, but it does all rather beg the question why, at such a crucial stage in the competition, you would suddenly decide to cook something you've never cooked before? I forget what his dessert was, which is par for the course with Dale. It may have been a lemon tart. There again it may not have been.The comments reduced poor Dale to tears. He obviously felt that he had come bottom of the class by a long way. Even Marcus felt the need to say something consoling, which almost had me falling off my chair. But in fact it was the previously seemingly unassailable Larkin who was left to plumb the depths. He proffered razor clams with some dumplings which MW apostrophised as 'appalling - horrible'. His dessert, which had been meant to be a white chocolate mousse, served in a mango, looked disgusting. Even the bullet headed greengrocer, who as everyone knows is a total pudding junkie, said it was just two piles of sludge on a plate. Wareing refused even to try it, and Torode said if Larkin messed up like this again he would get sent home.
In the end I didn't know who to feel most sorry for: Dale, for the indignity of being reduced to tears in front of the whole nation (or as much of it as watched Masterchef anyway), Wareing, who presumably was expecting to meet some talented amateur chefs at the top of their game and to sample some good food, or John Torode who one supposes had asked MW to come in the expectation of being able to show off some vibrant new talent, and had the embarrassing experience of seeing at least two of them serve up food which would have disgraced a GCSE cookery course.
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