In the UK: Channel 4, 9pm, Tuesdays. Repeated Thursdays 9pm, 12.05am, More4
In the US: BBC America, probably in 2007.
Characters re-cast: 0
Major characters gotten rid of: 0
Major new characters: 0 – it’s all Gordon, all the time!
Format change percentage: 10% (for one episode)
Number of cahones: 2
Gordon Ramsay can sometimes be something of a self-parody. A former professional football player who runs a half-marathon every Sunday, he’s now a multi-millionaire celebrity chef, best known for bullying people, shouting, asking people where their balls are (now in Spanish, as well as English!) and swearing. He is almost a living, breathing, stereotype of masculinity. All he needs is a rusty white van, a proper haircut and a rottweiler and he’ll be able to set up a testosterone donation centre for anyone who CAN’T FIND A PAIR! (I imagine, if it were possible for him to do so, Ramsay would talk like that: in capitals and exclusively punctuated with exclamation marks. He would also be known only as Ramsay.)
Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, now in its third series, gives Gordon a chance to use all four of the aforementioned talents in combination with his fifth, lesser known skill: helping people. Episode one gave him the chance to go to the Costa Del Sol to aid an ailing restaurant recover from a debt of €120,000. Said restaurant had found a niche on its particular part of the Costa: rather than copying all the other restaurants on the Costa and serving up sausages and chips to everyone (that really fills my very soul with despair. England, what has become of you?), the restaurant owner, Laurence Davey, had decided to serve Spanish food.
Was it still too adventurous for all those English people abroad? Or was the food just awful and liable to kill people, the service rubbish, and the floor itself covered in doggie excrement? Gordon was going to find out and tell Laurence how to fix it.
The trouble is, Gordon brought along his Ernest Hemingway guide to being a man…
Continue reading “Review: Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares 4.1”
