That MasterChef thing itll never catch on

Giles Coren & ,}

I came home from the beer hall on Wednesday a small bit the worse for wear, perplexing to have as small sound as I could but tripping on the tip step and descending into the bins, afterwards stabbing 7 or eight times with my key at the front door prior to I found the keyhole, acrobatics in to the radio room, flopping down on to the cat and branch on the telly to see what had happened in the cricket. Or may be the football. I wasnt sure.

But all I could find was the news, and on it was a story about the man who had won MasterChef, that was assumingly a really big deal. Now, Ive never seen MasterChef. I dont hold in food television. Poisons the mind, I regularly say. But they showed a integrate of clips of this associate winning and of a bald man with a voice similar to a Dickensian street-hawker cheering that cooking doesnt get ANY TUFFER nan nis! and additionally a gently oral Australian man who they pronounced was John Torode, and I realised that I recognised him.

But I didnt recognize him from the telly I swear to God, I thought Loyd Grossman was still the presenter of MasterChef I recognized him from a grotty small room off the Marylebone Road where I had left 6 or seven years ago for a shade exam that I had lost all about.

It had been a BBC thing, all really overwhelm hush, and I had been introduced to this Torode man and told that he was probably going to be presenting a new array of MasterChef that they claimed to be exhuming after a prolonged lay-off and they were seeking for a sidekick for him and longed for to try me out. They pronounced that what I had to do was to go turn these dual stand tables with Torode and eat the food on them and contend what I thought of it.

BACKGROUNDSuccess not on trial for MasterChef winnerThe Pacific; MasterChefAdman finds celestial alloy to win MasterchefLive chat: speak to the Masterchef last three

But the food is usually undressed bag salads and Ginsters thwart eggs, I said.

This is the BBC, Mr Coren, they said. We cant means to have tangible baked food on the plates.

Its going to be a bit of a balderdash show, then, I said.

Well have baked food when the show goes out. They said. This is usually a shade test.

Oh, I said, feeling really unmedia and out of the loop. And these dual dribbling gimps are not genuine contestants, then?

No, they said. One is the senior manager writer and the alternative one is my wife.

Oh I see, I said. Right, shall we get on with it?

So, anyway, they incited on the camera, and I ate a integrate of pieces of lettuce and a dilemma of Toblerone and simulated it was rabbit warm or something, and I talked to this still small Australian man with a choirboy face who seemed extremely good but didnt have most to say, and afterwards I went home. And never listened from them again.

Eventually, a integrate of weeks later, I called them up and said: So am I going to be on this foolish show or not?

And they said: No, youre as well posh.

Too posh? I said. But you could have seen on Wikipedia that I went to public propagandize and Oxford and I work for The Times. Of march Im effing posh! My name is Giles, for great out loud. What on earth did you get me down there for?

We thought may be you would have some-more of a mockney accent.

Well, thats flattering big of you, I said. Im so blissful youre keeping the category fight alive. But if you wish to know the truth, the show will never work anyway. You can sinecure the Artful sodding Dodger for all I care, but this is 2004 nobodys going to lay and watch full of blood MasterChef!

And I slammed the receiver down and sat behind to simulate on what a big, big mistake they were making, all round. I disbelief theyve got over it even now.

• I picked up the paper on Thursday (a small intoxicated from the Wednesday night that starred so irrelevantly at the tip of this column) and was assailed by the title Typical Germans! Oh no, I thought. They havent been bagging the object loungers, eating sausage, being irritatingly on time and rounding up all the Jews again?

But they hadnt. It was usually Sir Alex Ferguson being ungracious, miserly, red-faced, ignorant, rude, extremist and probably drunk. Typical Scot.

• Pop Quiz: According to the Ferret Education and Research Trust, that animal is apropos increasingly renouned between abundant immature women in London and the South East?

Wrong! Its whales.

No, usually kidding. Its ferrets. Apparently there are right away some-more seek out owners in the South of England than in the North, that is due, according to FERT (nice acronym, by the way, contrition the not the Ferret Advancement and Research Trust, really), to the decrease in tenure of operative ferrets in the North and additionally to a series of luminary seek out owners.

Principal between these last, apparently, is Paris Hilton, of whom there was a picture in the paper where I review this story holding an tangible ferret. Although I rather think it is a shade grab from her ultimate video, from just prior to the impulse when she attempts to hit Richard Gere out of Guinness World Records . . .

Madonna is an additional luminary who is pronounced by FERT to own one of these poor, no-longer-needed operative ferrets. Meanwhile, her former husband, Guy Ritchie, has of march supposing a much-needed home for most of the prosaic caps that are no longer indispensable in the North of England either.

• Marks Spencers ridiculously purgation food promotion debate has for a small time right away been The Land Where Words Go To Die. Syllable by syllable, this church to away shrink-wrapped grapes, fatless bacon and dishes so available they can eat themselves has obliterated the definition of difference such as fresh, tasty and bread, until the not usually food, the MS food means, roughly certainly, that it isnt food at all.

And right away it has assimilated up with The Sport Where Words Go To Die, Formula One, to launch a range of boys garments sorry, cool rigging desirous by the Vodafone McLaren Mercedes group and called the Living the Dream collection. And to foster these Marks Spencer Vodafone McLaren Mercedes crappy small T-shirts and poor jeans, theyve acted five young kids alongside Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button.

Living the dream, indeed. If your mental condition is to grow up unschooled, with no personality, and to expostulate turn in circles wearing the names of your multinational owners all over your body, badmouthing your teammates in the press since one of you thinks the alternative one got since a somewhat improved petrol cap, with the usually satisfaction for your miserable hold up being the vast risk income you are paid, that creates you so miserly you have to go and live in pestilent Monaco to equivocate profitable an honest taxation bill.

Its not usually a life. Its an MS life.