Sunday, February 08, 2009
Cooking With Lamb
Come Dine With MeFood and television is not often a happy marriage. Cooking programmes, in particular, find themselves at Relate trying to save the marriage, not for the sake of the children, but for the welfare of the raspberry coulis.
The beauty of food, and the consumption of it, is of course, a multi-sensory experience. In reality, we see it, smell it, touch it, taste it, hopefully don’t hear it, but you see what I mean.
On tv, the best we can hope for is a two dimensional hint at what has been cooked, which is why, since the early days of television, cookery shows have relied on personality and individuality to make the programme a success. To this day, we still rely on a cohort or ‘guest’ of the chef, to have a tasting on our behalf, and we can only judge by the level of the ‘oooh!’ and the ‘mmmm!’ whether the dish is a success.
Fanny Cradock presented food in the manner of a headmistress, chiding the nation, and dishing out lines with the ration coupon recipes. Appearing in the kitchen in evening gown and pearls, Fanny would berate her (not really married…) husband, Johnny, and cartoon henpecked husbands across the land winced as they peeled the spuds.
In the late sixties and early seventies, Graham Kerr, the ‘Galloping Gourmet’ became the staple diet of afternoon viewing with his glamorous, frantic personality, and his penchant for using rich ingredients. Kerr would finish the show by finding a pretty woman from the audience, with whom he would flirtingly share the dish he had just prepared.
Pretty much nothing changed in the eighties, nineties and now the noughties. Chefs and cooks came and went. From the irritating Worrall Thompson to the extravagant use of language of Ramsey; from the homely Delia to the sensuous Nigella, they drifted into our homes, and bookshelves, and away again.
In four years, Come Dine With Me has moved on from being one of those programmes students enjoy instead of attending lectures, and indeed has moved on from putting the focus on food.
In a relatively unchanged format, five people, unknown to one another, each host a dinner party on successive days of the week, secretly voting marks out of ten for each other, at the end of the evening’s ‘fun’. The winner, at the end of each week, receives one thousand pounds.
However, the show is now rather less about the food, and more about the social interaction between the contenders, and more vitally, the voiceover style commentary of Dave Lamb.
Opinions are split about Lamb’s contribution. He may be a comedy genius, adding a layer of hilarity that has made the programme compulsive viewing, or he is a smug ‘know-it-all’ whose clever dick comments destroy the warm nature of the show. I pretty much go with the former view.
Much of the appeal may be in the certainty of the format. These days we can be almost certain that the five ‘cooks’ will include, the camp one, the posh one, the aggravating one, the eccentric one, and the normal-ish one (who never wins).
To appeal to the voyeur in viewers, we also get to poke about in each contender’s house, peeping into cupboards and closets, where the quirkiness and individuality of people’s lives can often be displayed.
The show doesn’t really give enough scope for ‘Big Brother’ style show-offs to try and use the few minutes of screen time to audition for ‘fame’. The twenty-four minutes, each day, are tightly, and superbly, edited, to ensure we concentrate on the relationships between the participants, and on any quirks of the individuals. The editing suite loves nothing more than a dish going wrong, and how the moment is, or isn’t, resolved.
A glass of wine spilled on a sofa, a dropped anchovy, or a soufflé that won’t rise, and the camera lingers, whilst Dave Lamb spices up the commentary.
Of course, it is unlikely that any of us would ever have a semi-formal dining experience with the same people over five successive days, unless, of course, you are maitre d’ at The Wolseley. This unusual aspect of closeness to five strangers adds to the possibilities of passing friendship or, alternatively, alienation, and magnifies the campness or poshness, allowing Dave Lamb free rein with the capricious, comedic, discourse.
Naturally, Come Dine With Me will have a shelf life, just like that jar of mixed spices at the back of the cupboard, and we will get fed up with it in time, until it returns in 2015 in a burst of nostalgia, where it will be introduced by Ant & Dec.
Until that day, we can pretend to be interested in the recipes, and the winner of the thousand pounds, whilst sniggering at Dave Lamb’s asides, and wondering why so many people have feather boas at the back of their closets.
As a contestant, Fanny Cradock would have thought she had stumbled into hell on earth. She would have blamed it all on Johnny and written a stiff letter to the Daily Telegraph.
"I’m awarding Fanny a three, because she threw the Yorkshire pudding at me."
remotevision@gmail.com
# posted by Terence : 9:11 PM
