I'm sure there was a time when cookery programmes served one function, and one function alone: To show us, the great culinary uneducated, how to cook something other than sausage and mash.
Say what you like about programmes hosted by Nigella Lawson and Jamie Oliver - but at least at their heart, they have recipes for us to follow (or to laugh at the thought of following).
The same cannot be said for Food Poker (BBC 2, 4.30pm) which ends its current four-week run on Friday.
I can only assume some highly-paid executive was sat looking at the latest popular past-times research before having this mad idea: What about if we mix poker (all over the Sky channels - people pay to watch it) with cooking (also all over Sky channels). It's got to be a winner, surely?
Answer, in a word: no. It's crap. What we end up with is a programme where the sort of chefs whose previous telly exposure has been limtied to James Martin's Saturday Kitchen play against each in different rounds to see who can come up with the best meal.
Where does the poker come into it? Well, a pack of cards, each card with a different ingredient, is used to determine the ingredients. Presenter Matt Albright - who, I assume, is either paid by the broadcast hour or is on a very long community service at the Beeb given his high-profile on day-time at the moment - dishes out the first card and the the two chefs take it in turns to pick the remaining ones.
The idea, I think, is that the chefs try to pick each other's favourite ingredients to leave them scuppered. But most sensible chefs just go for the ingreidents they want. The two chefs then cook, of which we see maybe 30 seconds, before several audience randoms decide the winner who then faces another chef in the next heat, and so on. It goes on like this for 45 minutes.
The tension is, well, barely there. The chefs try to get excited, but struggle, and on the odd occasion some tactical ingreident selection appears to take place (and you'll never read that sentence on here again) it's flogged to death. Apparently, one of the chefs loves using ginger, so the chef got in there first.
And how is the winner selected to be the Food Poker winner? Phone vote? No, even more suspect than that - the two chefs who aren't going head-to-head in the final cook-off decide, gone are the randoms. Last night, the two chefs couldn't pick a winner, so who decided it? Only Matt. Who, by his own admission, had very little left to go at after the two judging (ie losing) chefs had had their bites.
I'm telling you, it makes the conversational chit-chat on The Weakest Link seem almost normal.
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