I love Marco Pierre White on Hell’s Kitchen

Marco Pierre WhiteApparently, Hell’s Kitchen hasn’t been a big ratings success this time round, which must be a bit galling for ITV.

You can surmise that when they realised that uberchef Marco Pierre White had agreed to take on the celeb chef role, they would have been creaming themselves.

Yup, the ‘enfant terrible’ of chefdom agreeing to appear on a reality TV show on ITV. Scarcely believeable. I know I didn’t believe it.

But there has been very little screaming and shouting. He hasn’t spent his time telling the ‘celebs’ that they’re a useless sack of shits, or whatever other insult chefs use. Quite the opposite. In fact, he’s been encouraging and pleasant.

And ironically, for me that’s what’s made the series so compelling. Unlike Gordon Ramsay, who is on TV every other day, MPW has hardly ever been interviewed on TV (in recent years anyway). Consequently, I knew nothing about the way he spoke, or acted.

And all the fireworks (and headlines that produce ratings) that Gordon Ramsay brought to the show are absent. The biggest story has been Jim Davidson’s use of the word ‘shirt-lifters’ to describe gay men. Admittedly not very PC and Brian Dowling had every right to be aghast, but there are far worse terms in use.

And watching MPW cook is beautiful. Every night he creates something that he loves to eat. Dover Sole with mushrooms the other night, which looked divine.

So actually a great programme to watch if you genuinely like food, but terrible if you’re a normal ITV1 viewer.

Nigella owns her own Routemaster!

Nigella LawsonI’m not obsessed with Nigella Lawson (honestly), but I have to make a point about this week’s episode of her ludicrous new series Nigella Express.

The ridiculously stilted and staged set-pieces that intersperse the actual cooking are bad enough – getting her son to pretend to be Kevin The Teenager was a particular lowlight – but this week, in an effort to pretend that she’s really ‘one of the hoi polloi’, Nigella was pictured (gasp!) on the bus!

Clearly, the one thing Nigella will never be able to do is blend in with the rest of the plebs in Primark, but they tried, by putting her on London’s cheapest method of transport.

Unfortunately, someone forgot to point out to Nigella (and the rest of the production team) that the iconic Routemaster buses (on which our esteemed cook was sitting) were phased out almost two years ago.

Obviously, if Nigella needs to go out nowadays and can’t find a taxi, she calls up her personal 98 Routemaster to make it look as if she’s not really that posh, after all.

Are record companies really that stupid?

Techcrunch has today revealed the latest attempt by record companies to encourage us to line their pockets for no reason at all. It’s called a Ringle and it will be a CD single, incorporating a new track, some other music and, wait for it, a ringtone of the track!

Wow, all those iTunes devotees are suddenly going to switch off their iPods and rush out to buy one of them, aren’t they?

I mean, a CD single – they’re the future, aren’t they? And you get a ringtone with it – pheweee! We can see people trying to slot that CD into their mobile right now!