and cook from them?’
He raises a valid point. Fast-paced lifestyles and the surge in the popularity and range of ready meals available have created sedentary evenings and less interest in trying to make the overly complicated dishes seen on screen. Everything has to happen quickly and although the industry has tried to adapt, take Jamie's 15-Minute Meals for example, viewers are still disaffected.
Warwick is also cynical in regard to television cooking shows and competitions, stating bluntly that ‘the reason chefs like going on Saturday Kitchen is because it fills a restaurant’. He is adamant too that it is television producers who are causing the problems: ‘with TV, they are obsessed, since Simon Cowell, with the contest format’.
And it’s not just television critics that take issue.
Michelin-starred Icelandic chef
Agnar Sverrisson, who runs four restaurants in London, is particularly
opinionated on this point. He is frustrated by young prospective chefs who have come to work for him brainwashed by reality TV, with a ‘get-rich-quick’ attitude and unwilling to put in the hard yards.
He sharply warns this generation that the recipe for success is blood, sweat and tears: ‘A lot of young kids want to be chefs because they see it on TV and think “yeah I want to do that”, they think it’s easy and that success is instant, but they don’t see how hard it is and how much work you have to do before you get anywhere.’
Keith Floyd went as far as believing that television programmes were harmful to the food industry and a chef’s knowledge of it, elegantly denouncing the phenomenon many years ago on a documentary by maintaining that TV chefs ‘have all been seduced by TV... All they can do is assemble pieces of gastronomic Lego without having the faintest idea where they ******* come from.”
Eric Ripert, chef and co-owner of the three Michelin star restaurant Le Bernardin in New York, has an opposing view. He strongly believes in the future of TV cookery shows and hopes that they are ‘not the flavour of the moment because it’s good for the industry, it’s good for the chefs and it’s good for everyone’.
Despite his optimism, which is shared by a number of the industry’s leading lights, the overriding sense of disillusion that pervades on all sides of the debate is clear to see. A consensus seems to have emerged that many cookery shows are failing the public, but the occasional gem such as the final episode of The Great British Bake Off which attracted 9 million viewers will only urge directors to forge ahead and broadcast more of the same.
