Tuesday 17 August 2010

129 Wastage / Food / Masterchef

The Oxford dictionary describes time-wasting as ‘sitting down for an hour to watch two rather arrogant grumpy people you don’t know taste some food made by a few other frantic people you don’t know and say it’s a bit crap, or that it’s quite good. You don’t get to taste it yourself either.’ As dear gran used to say ‘what a steaming pile of horse felch.’ But as with most other pointless activities such as ballroom dancing and Jade Goody it has become a staple televisual extravaganza. Only Kerry Katona can honestly say she is truly of less use. Leading dinner lady Mavis O’Reilly describes the juxtaposition between the culture of victuals being seen as standard provisional necessity with the commonplace urbanity misconception of what she labels the ‘fiscal luminary fare’ in her 2007 book ‘You’re Just a Fucking Cook, Cunt’.

Amazingly television producers pulled off an even more amazing feat with Junior Masterchef. A preference to watching Graham Nortons attempts to dock some recently crowned X Factor numpty on the other side it may well be but how any human with the ability to vomit can sit through rubber panted 13 year old Augusta from Oxfordshire picking the shot from a freshly slaughtered grouse while talking about mummys’ walk-in butler is staggering (although strangely sexually alluring). However, it does seem to thrive in the ratings game. This is unlike senior citizen Masterchef, which was taken off air two episodes into the series after Coventry based Maggie Stern simply cooked a house brick to warm up little Alfies bed before George Smith from Huddersfield, initially refusing to be filmed by a Fuzzy Top, spent the allocated thirty minutes boiling his own wellington boot in a bucket.

But more interestingly is how much can be deciphered about the contestant from their choice of dish. Whereas Martin McGuiness’ Cherry Bomb Pie hardly came as a surprise, eyebrows were certainly raised by Beryl Reeds Horny Vagina Crumpets and John ‘Johns Not Mad’ Davidsons’ Cunt Shit Fuck Nigger Nigger Whore Fuck Bitch Greek Cunt Salad, but at least uncertainties were finally put to rest about Nick Griffin when he produced his now notorious Masterchef final winning Ku Klux Flan.