The Best Australian Humorous Writing (30 page)

With a lot of vino and the latest
RocKwiz
trivia book, a great night of male bonding was had. And, having watched my chef, I feel ready to tackle the task personally next time a might-have-been-a-sheep comes a-knocking.

Santa, I need a boning knife for Christmas. And no, son, we are not getting a lamb for the backyard. The only small ruminant I want to see round here is silent. Very.

JOHN LETHLEAN

It was a day like any other really. With one serious exception.

Instead of getting up, doing all the usual stuff and skulking off to the workstation, I got up early, went straight to the couch and watched television, all day.

I was crook; I'd loved to have blamed the flu vaccination but in fact I was poorly before the nice nurse did her jabbing. Next day, I switched on and rostered myself off. Nobody was home to feel sorry for me, but that didn't seem a reason not to wallow in self-pity on their behalf. And what's the point of paying for subscription television if you don't exploit it?

So, instead of hitting the keyboard, I slipped into a sleeping bag, grabbed a pillow and hit the three-seater. And watched the food channel. All day.

At 6am, on comes Michael Chiarello's
Napa
. Never heard of it. Or him. I'm drinking orange juice and Chinese tea; he's stuffing a leg of pork with onions and spices. He's slick, confident, gregarious. He's American, for goodness sake. He looks like a Gap model and I even like the food he's doing. I hate him.

Next is Georges Laurier, from Quebec, in
Cook Like a Chef
. It's another glam cooking demo with more raw meat, a bit much at
this hour really. He exhibits all the traits of his predecessor, except he's wearing chef's whites, not Gap.

“Reez-oh-toe, what a nice dish,” says Georges as he demonstrates the 1235th risotto technique ever done on telly. No wonder I can't make risotto.

Top Chef
accompanies sunrise. It's a reality elimination game for aspiring chefs, nine hyped-up Americans whose first challenge is to cook a dish based on ingredients bought for $20 at a petrol station. Intense. But strangely compelling. The product placement is shameless.

Cooking in Paradise
: Gioconda Scott speaks Spanish better than she cooks for a camera, but nothing surpasses her Oxbridge vowels. Coxon's
Royal Feast
: everything you didn't need to know about the cooking of a royal family in South Africa. Yawn.
Party Starters
. American tripe.

Time for some toast and coffee.

Masterchef Goes Large
. I've heard about it: the British elimination show with expat Aussie John Torode. It's punchy, fun, but not as over the top as the Americans. Thank God.

Heat in the Kitchen
is something I'd been meaning to watch again anyway: Sydney chefs and Sydney restaurant critics fight it out in the great battle for
Good Food Guide
hats. I can relate.

Time for a spot of convalescent lunch—pasta and parmesan— as
Market Kitchen
mixes cooking and produce stories with food writer Matthew Fort and Tom Parker Bowles (yes, her son) looking about as jolly hockey sticks as you'd imagine.

Tamasin's
Great British Classics
has Daniel Day-Lewis' earnest little sister behaving a bit like Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall without the sense of humour. If food and cooking's fun for our Tam, she hides it well.

Next up (with a little slumber en route) is our old mate Neil Perry with
Food Source
, which must be at least four years old.
There's a lot more grey in the ponytail these days. Good show then, good show now.

French Leave
: John Burton Race's canal change to southern France. With a camera crew along for the ride. No wonder his family life's a mess.

More of the Gap man. He's still good. I still hate him.

And then the avuncular fish man and part-time Australian Rick Stein—from a few years back—making another show about Padstow. He owns Padstow, by the way. Ming Tsai (
Simply Ming
) demonstrates his appalling dress sense and ability to put at least one viewer to sleep almost immediately. I wake to
Food Fight
(having slept through Huey): it's high-five and yee-hahs as a couple of amateur marathon runners (men) cook off against a couple of bookish Ivy League types (women). More corn please.

Back to Australia for the straightforward but not unpleasant
Good Chef, Bad Chef
followed by
Heaven's Kitchen Cookbook
, an unashamed pitch to those of us vulnerable to the possibly nonexistent mythical charms of a bucolic English idyll, to wit, host Mike Robinson's country village pub. Fantastic.

And Jamie; he had to come. It's no mistake the guy is prime time, but will we be watching re-runs of a 25-year-old Oliver when the guy's expecting his first grandchild?

Another snooze during
Chef at Home
. And dinner—more pasta and parmesan (with eggs)—in front of the
River Cottage
with the aforementioned Fearnley-Whittingstall. Is this the best series of food series ever?

Market Chef
again … hey, I saw this at breakfast. Another episode of
Masterchef Goes Large
. And another of
Heat in the Kitchen
. We shuffle from Australia to the UK via the US, more or less constantly.

Rachel Allen (
Rachel's Favourite Food at Home
) is apparently famous. Why? She cooks baked potatoes. She's followed by a couple
of forgettable Sloane rangers wasting an entire half-hour on chocolate on
Chocolate Covered
. The programming seems to get lamer as the night gets older. It's not helping the mood or health.

But then it all comes good at 9.30pm when Peta Mathias' humble but informative
Taste Takes Off
explores the back streets of Hanoi. At 10pm, after a challenging day doing exactly nothing, I drag myself off the couch and into bed. I'm feeling a bit better. It's been an informative day.

Once upon a time you sought out the rare food program on television and chewed it up; now you can watch them 24 hours, seven days a week. What a concept. How sick would I need to be for that?

GRAEME BLUNDELL

You can imagine Jamie Oliver saying of fellow television culinary master Gordon Ramsay, “Gordon ain't just a scrotum-faced sack of testosterone; he's got 10 Michelin stars, for Christ's sake.” Chef (“It's my [expletive deleted] kitchen”) Ramsay hates being labelled a celebrity chef and has little interest in seeing his “scrawny, crinkly, wrinkled face like the map of Wales coming out” on the screen.

But he is seemingly omnipresent, greatly (expletive deleted) talented, and back for the third series of the globally successful
The F Word
.

TV chefs are defining the meaning of cooking in this celebrity age. As Nigella Lawson once said, “cooking is the new rock'n'roll”, presumably following hairdressing, reality TV, knitting, spelling bees, India and decorating.

The culinary Susan Sontag, who can so eruditely mention Marcel Proust in the same breath as praline, may be stretching it, but there's no doubt that cooking is losing its attachment to a living culture and becoming a new form of global entertainment.

Before Lawson, no one had ever so softly name-dropped ingredients as though they were designer labels. Food is increasingly part of the madness of popular culture, tied up with anxiety, guilt
and fear. And in Ramsay's case, sex, as every show features the onetime professional soccer player topless.

Cooking shows, once considered a daytime format, conventionally gendered as feminine, are now a staple of mainstream, terrestrial programming, many of them fronted by hyperactive, tes-tosterone-driven men such as Ramsay.

Their high-energy shows are a central part of the hybridisation of formats that characterises contemporary TV, often incorporating other styles of programming such as the travel show, game show and fly-on-the-wall documentary. Ramsay's brazen TV style looks like a foodie version of Jerry Bruckheimer's cop show aesthetic.
The F Word
is all explosive angles, extreme close-ups and rapid-fire editing. There is a mental acuteness at work, sophisticated, contrived, attention-grabbing.

In
The F Word
he has created a new TV genre, the foodie-friendly action-adventure, an MTV-paced foodie joy-ride. Every activity Ramsay engages in is sexy, glossy, high-camp fun.

He enters the first show in the new series like a parody of Marlon Brando before he started eating, prowling through the restaurant set, slamming down the bloody carcass of a deer and shouting, “There's dinner!”

Ramsay has become a kind of actor alive with resonance for his audience. He's almost Shakespearean in his delight in the big moment, his hysterical profanity and in his liking for live animals turned into carpaccio before our eyes.

He has constructed a big-top culinary circuit in which he revels, his passion for his food relentlessly under the spotlight. His series is a hybrid of cooking demonstration, TV food journalism, celebrity chat show, strident sitcom, and a reality-style behind-the-scenes look at the way great kitchens work.

There are also the mischievous stunts that bring the swearing, swaggering chef into controversial contact with guns, horsemeat, breast milk and the new superfood, blood.

In this episode, he treks off to Norway, diving through ice in a bulky dry suit in search of the monster king crab, the world's largest crustacean. “My balls feel like two (expletive deleted) ice cubes,” he yells at the camera. (I think I had counted 43 uses of the f-word by this point. Ramsay leaves the profane
Deadwood
well behind in the swearing stakes.) When he's not out hunting and shooting or butchering hard-to-find things to eat, Ramsay's in the glamorous F Word restaurant with amateur brigades of wannabes trying to prove they have the skills and character to deliver under the pressure of a professional restaurant service.

And Ramsay is on a mission to find a talented female chef who can fill the shoes of legendary TV cook Fanny Cradock, as part of his “Get women back in the kitchen” campaign. Of course, it's called Find Me a Fanny.

Celebrity guest Dawn French can't help herself. “Interested in my fanny?” she asks, licking those lascivious lips. The pulchritudinous
Vicar of Dibley
actor seems to be a hit with the randy restaurateur, who can't stop snogging her.

You can't imagine the scholarly molecular gastronomist Heston Blumenthal copping a feel in
In Search of Perfection
; his show is more witty chemistry lesson than in-your-face cookery program. Blumenthal's Berkshire restaurant, The Fat Duck, was named world's best several years ago by a panel of international pundits and owns three Michelin stars. It is famous for its egg-and-bacon ice cream, tobacco chocolates and sardine-on-toast sorbet.

In his eight-part series, the stocky, oddly groovy Blumenthal, his cool obsessiveness totally captivating, focuses on some of Britain's classic dishes, from fish and chips to roast beef. This week, bangers and mash and treacle tart get the Blumenthal treatment. Dressed in white coat and safety goggles, he scientifically dismantles the traditional recipes with liquid nitrogen and thermally kinetic dry ice.

Like a mad scientist from a Jules Verne story, Blumenthal seeks to create the ultimate taste sensation in his purpose-built
laboratory-style kitchen, using his famous pressure cookers, vacuum cleaners and gas chromatographs. He employs innovative ways to film the cooking process, too, with infrared, ultraviolet, heat sensitive micro-cams and graphics that illustrate molecular animation.

Blumenthal introduces us to food growers across the globe, as well as like-minded passionate researchers, making this a culinary version of Michael Palin's
Around the World in 80 Days
.

The abundance of TV chefs, especially one as ardently scientific as Blumenthal, probably confuses as much as it assists anyone at home trying to learn the subtleties of cooking. But the rest of us can drool over the populist, telegenic foodie flirts on the screen, soaking up their subliminal message about money, self-esteem and an elusively elegant lifestyle.

In their very different ways, Ramsay and Blumenthal have turned TV food into a new form of spectator sport, fascinating, sometimes frightening and always deeply humbling for anyone who thinks they know anything about cooking.

Phillip Adams
is Australia's most ancient newspaper columnist— fifty years and counting—and the ABC's most biased broadcaster. Although he has published twenty collections of jokes—and despite being described by Gough Whitlam as “Australia's greatest humour-ist”—he despises all forms of levity. He gets particularly angry when people describe his film
The Adventures of Barry McKenzie
as a comedy. Both that film and this column were “deadly serious”.

David Astle
has written two novels, a true-crime book plus a trivia-travel guide to Australia—and his publishers wish he'd settle for a single genre. “Oxtales”, a short story, won the James Joyce Suspended Sentence in 2001, while his short plays have been performed in Sydney and Melbourne. He reviews books for Radio National, teaches journalism at RMIT and is also an incurable maker of cryptic crosswords.

Graeme Blundell
is an actor, director, producer and writer who has been associated with many pivotal moments in Australian theatre, film and television. Now the national TV critic for
The Australian,
his autobiography,
The Naked Truth
, has just been published. He lives on the NSW coast with writer Susan Kurosawa.

The Chaser
team has created the ABC TV series
The Election Chaser, CNNNN, The Chaser Decides
and
The Chaser's War on Everything
. Since founding the widely acclaimed but mostly unread newspaper
The Chaser
in 1999, the team has produced comedy in all major media, including TV, radio, books and Christmas cracker jokes.
The Chaser
is now a satirical media empire which rivals Rupert Murdoch's News Corp in all fields except power, influence, popularity and profitability.