Celebrity Chefs, Final Solution.

The question

Having watched Nigella Lawson’s faux-erotic Christmas programmes and having ranted about Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall recently, I’m beginning to wonder about the cult of the celebrity chef. My question is this: are all of them insufferable arseholes?

The evidence

Firstly let’s think about Nigella. Apart from mimicking fellatio with a spoon and giving the camera come-hither looks, she’s unbearably smug and patronising. The subtext appears to be ‘you can never be as rich, sexy and talented as me, but let’s see if you can learn something here’.

She also two-timed her dying husband (the journalist John Diamond) with Charles Saatchi. Of course, we wouldn’t have heard much about that as she is close friends with that other member of the media elite, PR guru Matthew Freud.

Now let’s consider the case of Ainsley Harriot. Imagine living with him. Can you visualise anything more ghastlier than waking up to his gurning, camp countenance every morning, knowing that he was going to give you an over-enthusiastic, painful seeing-to?

Then reflect upon Anthony Worrell-Thompson, the fat, opinionated fag-peddlar (he’s spokesman for Forest, the Freedom Organisation for the Right to Enjoy Smoking Tobacco). Loathsome slug of a man.

Gary Rhodes, the spiky-coiffed 80s throwback. Egotistic cock.

Actually, the more I consider it, they’re all scum.

The solution

I’m not generally in favour of capital punishment, but I think a pogrom ridding the country of this culinary televisual malignancy is urgently needed. I suggest that we create a new reality television series named ‘Cook’s Cannibal Castaway’. I think the name is fairly self-explanatory, but the idea is this: we stick all celebrity chefs on a barren island with no food, but excellent cooking facilities. A grateful nation could watch as they descend into a kind of chef Lord of the Flies scenario, with a naked, pink Anthony Worrell Thompson strung up squealing by Gordon Ramsay and Heston Blumenthal, ready to be bled and slathered in one of Ainsley’s branded marinades.

By the way

I’m desperately hoping that the exception to the ‘celebrity chefs are tossers’ rule will be my hero, Ray Mears, who is making his contribution to the genre tonight with ‘Ray Mears Wild Food’.