Jamie in your kitchen

I don’t watch a lot of cookery shows on TV, but you’d have to live somewhere pretty soundproof not to hear the bottom of their ideas barrel being scraped. The bar having been set suitably low, I think my idea for a new cookery show is better than plenty of the stuff that is getting made.

I got the idea after reading a tweet by Shaun Usher about how he’d just spent sixty minutes making one of Jamie’s fifteen minute meals. We all know the problem: cookery shows, columns and books that are supposed to give you ideas you can put into practice in your own kitchen just aren’t realistic. You don’t have the equipment, you can’t source the ingredients, and you don’t have the skills. It’s unsurprising that Shaun can’t make as a meal as fast as Jamie can, when Jamie is a professional chef with a state of the art kitchen and a team of producers to do his shopping. My idea for a cookery show, called Jamie in Your Kitchen, addresses these problems. I think Jamie would do it fine, but if they got someone else they should probably change the name.

The idea is that they find someone who has a kitchen but hardly ever cooks, and then Jamie comes round and cooks something lovely for them. They can give it a bit of a reality show slant, where they interview the bum beforehand, getting some soundbites about how they don’t know which end of the potato-peeler to use, and maybe show them eating a takeaway with their friends. Then Jamie comes round and has a look at their kitchen, which the producers have discreetly had cleaned, and says what a waste and so on. Then we follow Jamie around the contestant’s local supermarket, where he says what he’s going to make and makes a big show of how all the weird ingredients are right there waiting to be used. Then he cooks something using the sloth’s equipment and kitchen, intercut with more soundbites about how they didn’t even realize they owned a roasting tin and so forth. Then Jamie and the slob eat the food, and agree that it’s very nice, and that they’ll turn over a new leaf now they’ve seen how easy it is.

This solves the problems about not having the equipment they use on cookery shows and not being able to source the ingredients. It doesn’t solve the problem about Jamie being a better and presumably faster cook than Shaun, but two out of three isn’t bad.