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TV review: Gordon Ramsay’s new show is the Big Mac of television

Gordon Ramsay's Future Food Stars
Gordon Ramsay's Future Food Stars

If Gordon Ramsay’s new TV show were a food, it’d be a Big Mac because even though I know it’s pretty bad, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to enjoying it quite a bit.

Gordon Ramsay’s Future Food Stars – which uses the oh-so-amusing hashtag FFS – is an unapologetic rip-off of The Apprentice but with a foodie bent.

Ramsay is supposed to be finding a food or drink business to invest £150,000 of his own cash in, but from the second the opening titles finished you could tell it was also about caressing his monster-sized ego.

Nothing says “food competition” like forcing  contestants to leap off a 40ft cliff to show their drive to succeed.”

How else do you explain why the contestants were forced to stand patiently on a Cornish beach waiting for Gordon to jump out of a helicopter into the sea and swim to shore?

And nothing says “food competition” like forcing those same contestants to leap off a 40ft cliff in order to show their drive to succeed.

Gordon Ramsay is front and centre of Future Food Stars.

When the food challenges did eventually start, things got a little bit better – although they seemed to have borrowed liberally from the bit in Masterchef when contestants split into teams and, for example, cook lunch for the cast of Casualty.

But since this is Gordon though, conflict is the main ingredient on the menu and this show certainly didn’t disappoint. I haven’t watched The Apprentice for a few years, but Future Food Stars reminded me that my favourite bit of that show was watching big egos collide.

There’s fun in watching cock-sure cooks making diabolical decisions and trying in vain to salvage their dignity.”

Obviously, none can compare to Gordon’s, but there’s still plenty of fun to be had in watching these cock-sure cooks making diabolical decisions and trying in vain to salvage their dignity when the petty arguments erupt.

How much of brash Gordon you can stomach will determine your tolerance for this show, but I found it surprisingly fun, against all my better judgment. A true guilty pleasure.


Dark journey into addiction

The dark journey through drug addiction was graphically and tragically charted in the epic documentary Life Of Crime: 1984-2020 (Sky Documentaries).

This was like the 7 Up series except instead of chronicling children through their lives, the subjects were New Jersey addicts Rob, Freddie and Deliris.

Director Jon Alpert’s almost 40-year dedication to the project is remarkable, as was the trio’s journey through addiction, recovery, prison and freedom.

This wasn’t an easy watch by any stretch and some of it was astonishingly graphic, but it was a real eye-opener and did a great job humanising people who are too easy to ignore.


Gripping look at scandalous family

Even though I’m losing my appetite for yet another documentary about Ghislaine Maxwell, the BBC’s new three-parter about her family made for undoubtedly gripping television.

While Ghislaine and Jeffrey Epstein’s relationship will play a bigger part of House Of Maxwell in the weeks to come, the first episode was dominated by the rise and fall of her father, media mogul Robert.

Media baron Robert Maxwell.

Documentaries like these stand or fall on how much new material they can unearth and this had a doozy of an exclusive.

Robert Maxwell, it turned out, had a habit of secretly recording his close associates and the audio was played for the first time, providing a fascinating glimpse behind the scenes.


Flashback to the 90s

If you’re of a certain age and want to get drunk on nostalgia, BBC2’s Top Of The Pops: The Story Of… series on Saturday nights will more than hit the sweet spot.

We’re knee-deep in the 1990s now and the archival footage of past performances, news reports and new interviews with stars of yesteryear really takes me back to the days of Nevica jackets, Britpop and inexplicably violent Tango adverts.


Film of the week: Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood (Netflix)

Director Richard Linklater has already examined the life of a child in his Oscar-winning 2014 film Boyhood, but he clearly still has much to say about the subject.

Utilising the same rotoscope animation techniques he showcased in his earlier films Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly, Apollo 10½ is a rose-tinted view of his Texan childhood in the late ’60s and also a flight of fantasy (or is it?) about a boy called Stanley who is recruited by Nasa to go on a top-secret mission to the Moon.

Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood.

Linklater’s memories of suburban life during that tumultuous period in American history are pin-sharp and you don’t need to have lived through them to feel the golden glow of nostalgia.

And although the Nasa storyline perhaps feels a tad out of place with the Wonder Years-like memoir, it’s still a warm-hearted trip worth taking.