TV Review: Gordon Ramsay's F Word/True Stories

Published on Tuesday 3 November 2009 18:03

Gordon Ramsay's F Word , Channel 4 True Stories: Sweethearts of the Prison Rodeo, More4

Screeds are being written at the moment about the decade almost past, with social commentators crawling over each other to define these confusing times. They might as well give up, because last night I witnessed something which encapsulated the Noughties in a nutshell. This epoch-defining moment occurred – as epoch-defining moments invariably do – on Gordon Ramsay's F Word, to wit: the titular chef engaging in banal conversation with Katie Price in an over-lit kitchen. If that doesn't sum up the head-aching emptiness of modern culture then I don't know what does.

It was a revealing encounter in many ways. For instance, Price's favourite dish is chicken Kiev. Did you know that? I didn't know that. Also, she likes going to bed on a full stomach, feels that sex is better when you're sober, and spends over 6,000 a month on her horses. Price unleashed these bombshells while she and Ramsay competed to see who could cook the best chicken Kiev, thus giving the host ample opportunity to crack breast-related double entendres. The Noughties, everyone.

What is Gordon Ramsay's F Word for exactly? It won't teach you how to cook, since the brief segments in which Ramsay actually cooks are edited so frenziedly that it's impossible to take anything in. It's almost as if the programme is terrified that viewers might find cookery boring (then why are they watching?), hence the employment of an editing technique as jittery as the permanently anxious Ramsay himself. A jostling mess of crash-zooms and whip-pans, it looks like it's been edited by a dangerously caffeinated Martin Scorsese.

So formulaic it might as well come in a test tube, Gordon Ramsay's F Word is, if nothing else, a perfect example of a modern factual entertainment show, in that it is neither factual nor entertaining. This year Ramsay is pretending to be interested in finding Britain's best restaurant. This means each episode is preoccupied with a suspense-free cook-out between opposing chefs, which no-one cares about apart from them. It's dreadful television, a bulging bag of superficial nothingness. And Ramsay knows it. Look into his nervous, darting eyes. Look at the way he races through each episode like a man whose only immediate concern is reaching the nearest commode. He knows that when essays are written on popular culture in the early 21st century, his scowling face will loom large as evidence of the vulgarity of the celebrity age. And I doubt that gladdens him. Because when all is said and done, I'm sure he'd rather be remembered as a talented chef than as an obnoxious TV turn. Such is the price you pay for embracing the medium so aggressively.

Hey, convicts are people too you know! That was the hardly profound message behind True Stories: Sweethearts of the Prison Rodeo, a ponderous documentary following prisoners partaking in the Oklahoma State Penitentiary rodeo. An annual event since 1940, the rodeo recently welcomed female participants. The event's importance as something to look forward to, and the way it grants the inmates a sense of pride and achievement, rang clear. Unfortunately, the film lacked narrative drive, and it failed to address why the female incarceration rate in Oklahoma is more than twice the national average.