‘We can’t go on like this,” I said to my husband yesterday, urgently. “This” being our pandemic-induced addiction to Australian TV cooking competitions. We’re hopelessly in thrall to Aussie MasterChef and My Kitchen Rules (a sort of supercharged Come Dine With Me) and have consumed countless hours of each. Well, I suppose I could count: we’ve watched perhaps 15 seasons of 50-plus episodes and each episode lasts an hour. That’s a full month of our lives measured out in dodgy fondants, oven malfunctions and a truly regrettable number of savoury ice-creams. How many times have I shouted “Never shell prawns under time pressure!” in exasperation? How many times has my husband tutted as candidates swoon over the “sexy” French chef and host Manu Feildel, claiming he looks like a plumber he knows? So many, too many.
My rock-bottom moment was prompted by the depraved extremes now required to get our fix. I downloaded another obscure streaming platform with an appalling interface last week (it doesn’t even have a “continue watching” feature, imagine), and I could have written several novels in the hours I’ve spent watching a stupid beer advert featuring “Barcelona singer Bad Gyal”. All for what? A brief hit of some beardie from the Northern Territory back in the mid-2010s wondering whether macadamia crumb is an appropriate “textural element” for his kangaroo rendang. Then there is the fact that the My Kitchen Rules host Pete Evans became an antivax conspiracy theorist and crank. Do we have no self-respect? We don’t even like cooking!
It has to stop. I thought the iron had entered my soul, but then I found out that Nigella Lawson had replaced Evans, making new seasons vastly less problematic and more tempting. Plus, someone on MasterChef described one of those cooked supermarket chickens as “a bachelorette’s handbag” in a recent episode, a description so pleasing that I’m wavering. Covid broke people in ways we can’t imagine or describe; maybe I should accept this is mine. So if anyone can recommend another easily accessible cooking show that goes well with crisps and some light second screening, I’m all (crispy pig) ears.
Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
