Crazy Delicious
Tuesday, Channel 4
Avenue 5
Wednesday, Sky One
Rating: 
White House Farm
Wednesday, ITV
Rating: 
I watch a lot of cooking shows. I don’t know why. It’s not as if I like to cook that much. I suppose it’s easy on the eye and, like the police procedural, is narratively satisfying with a clear beginning (the crime, the ingredients), middle (the investigation, the cooking) and end (the arrest, the final dish). If you could marry the police procedural to the cookery show – Foyle’s Trifle, Killing Eve’s Pudding, Scott & Baileys – that would be perfect, but in the meantime there’s the tried and trusted names (Nigella, Jamie, Rick) and the tried and trusted formats (MasterChef, Bake Off, Come Dine With Me), which have been around for ages, so it’s very much time for something new to take off. Could that be Crazy Delicious?
Hannah whips up a feast for the ‘Cooking Gods’ in Crazy Delicious. If you go in for a format-heavy show and then ignore the format, you don’t, I would suggest, have much of a show
This show’s USP appeared promising as it was a Willy Wonka-ish ‘completely edible set’, from which the three competitors must ‘forage’ their ingredients. ‘They’ll use the ingredients growing all around them as they compete to transform them into extraordinary dishes unique to anything you have ever seen or tasted before,’ said the presenter, comedian Jayde Adams.
She showed us soil made from chocolate and trees you could tap for maple syrup, and also a lemon which, when you bit into it, turned out to be lemon meringue pie… But how can that be an ingredient? For this recipe you will also need a lemon that is a lemon meringue pie? So I was beginning to worry quite early on, shall we say.
The judges – or ‘Cooking Gods’ as they are called – are British chef Heston Blumenthal, the Swedish chef Niklas Ekstedt and American chef Carla Hall, and the first task for the three competitors (Adam, Hannah, Hardeep, all food Instagrammers) was to showcase strawberries. So they picked the strawberries from the ‘completely edible set’, although it isn’t really completely edible, is it?
There seemed to be a heck of a lot of plastic in there. (Those toadstools, that ivy.) But once the strawberries were picked, the show then, bizarrely, ditched its own conceit. Flour, milk, eggs, breadcrumbs, where were they coming from? A larder somewhere, of course. And you certainly wondered about Adam’s ‘strawberry cheesecake chicken wings’ as in: did he ‘forage’ a chicken and then ‘forage’ its wings off? Later, he cooked a Tomahawk steak, so did he ‘forage’ a cow and then ‘forage’ a rib off? If you go in for a format-heavy show and then ignore the format, you don’t, I would suggest, have much of a show.
Meanwhile, Adams, who has the potential to be a wonderful breath of fresh air, was horribly under-utilised, while the judges spoke purely in strained banalities. (‘If you pull this off it will be a cracker.’) In short, Crazy Delicious represents no threat to our already established cooking shows, not least because it makes as much sense as… asking contestants to make a three-course feast from a 2004 Nissan Micra? But don’t worry too much about that… there’s a big larder behind them!
Avenue 5 is the new series from Armando Iannucci (The Thick of It, Veep) and I’ve watched three episodes (of eight) and I still don’t know what it is or what it wants to be. I can only say it has the feel of something he scribbled on a napkin in breaks from working on a project he actually cared about.
It’s a sci-fi comedy and is set 40 years hence on board a cruise ship in space that’s thrown massively off course, which means the passengers won’t be coming home to Earth for years, if at all. On the plus side, this does look wonderful with its pop art and retro sets, and Hugh Laurie as the bewildered captain is watchable, if only because Laurie always is. (I love him and also he is hot.) But otherwise this is slight, and if it’s a satire, then of what? Selfish, affluent tourists? Rich corporations? Elon Musk and Richard Branson types? I promise you, I have no idea.
Rebecca Front and Hugh Laurie in Avenue 5. It’s a sci-fi comedy and is set 40 years hence on board a cruise ship in space that’s thrown massively off course, which means the passengers won’t be coming home to Earth for years, if at all
The characters are disappointingly broad. The men are hopeless and the women are bitches, and they are all insufferable. Rebecca Front plays Karen, one of those ‘I want to see the manager’- type passengers, and Karen is insufferable. There’s a couple divorcing and they are insufferable, and also on board is Judd (Josh Gad), the billionaire man-child who has bankrolled this whole enterprise, but he at least is funny. No he isn’t. He is also insufferable. (That was just my little joke, as jokes are so sparse elsewhere; I didn’t laugh once.) It’s also quite poorly acted – Gad seems to be imitating Jack Black? – and we’re given no reason as to why any of this might matter.
However, let’s not end on a downer, as there is still the crime drama series White House Farm, which continues and is marvellous and terrific. Just thought I’d mention that, in case I come across as someone who hates everything. Which mostly I do. But this I very much don’t.