When cooking meets chaos in reality television show

Hannah Twiggs, The Independent

There was a time when cooking shows were just that. Someone calmly demonstrating how to roast a chicken without incident. Someone explaining why a sauce splits and how to rescue it. The stakes were low, the tone gentle, the kitchen a place of competence rather than combustion. Even when competitive formats arrived, they retained at least a basic reverence for skill. Early MasterChef contestants were judged on cooking, not their charisma, clothes or “chat”, let alone romantic intrigue.

The Heat — ITV’s latest reality experiment — by contrast, takes a rather different approach. The series strands 10 chefs in Barcelona, installs them in four-Michelin-starred Jean-Christophe Novelli’s glossy restaurant as he searches for the “next rising star”, and, for good measure, sticks reality royalty Olivia Attwood in the role of glamorous presenter, love-red ballgown and all. Sounds normal, until the cameras keep rolling and we’re promised staff nights out, post-shift dates and the sort of personal entanglements that tend to arise when attractive, sleep-deprived people are forced to live and work together. In other words, the result looks suspiciously like the Love Island villa, with aprons... and knives. What could possibly go wrong?

The kitchen as competition, soap opera and dating show all at once. It might be the strangest cooking show yet, although food television has always had a curious relationship with reality. Even its early incarnations carried a faint whiff of performance. Fanny Cradock, swathed in theatrical makeup and chiffon frocks, did not merely teach Britain to cook after the war – she made it feel glamorous, decadent and something closer to stagecraft than domestic duty.

Nigella Lawson, of course, pushed that idea further, transforming the act of stirring a saucepan into something sensual with a raised eyebrow and double entendre. Gordon Ramsay raised the temperature with Boiling Point, and later Hell’s Kitchen, where screaming in someone’s face because they’ve wrecked the Wellington became not just normal, but entertaining. Anthony Bourdain added romance of a different kind: chefs as sleep-deprived wanderers, kitchens as gritty worlds of excess and camaraderie. Even the Hairy Bikers, hardly pin-ups, turned cooking into something driven as much by friendship and personality as recipes.

Along the way, food television settled into two familiar modes. MasterChef gave us pressure, precision and the quiet terror of undercooked steak. The Great British Bake Off offered the opposite — bunting, handshakes and the sort of jeopardy where the worst outcome is a slightly deflated genoise. Between them, the modern televised kitchen became either intensely stressful or aggressively cosy. By the time Netflix joined the feast, chefs were filmed like auteurs. At one end sits Chef’s Table, a series so reverent it borders on devotional. At the other, Is It Cake?, where people spend less time cooking than squinting suspiciously at objects that may or may not be sponge.

Kitchens, and their inhabitants, have been aestheticised, mythologised and lightly fetishised for years. If anything, Fanny Cradock might have rather enjoyed the notion of chefs shedding their professional composure — and possibly their dignity — once the working day was done. Which makes The Heat feel less like a radical departure than the obvious conclusion. Food television no longer trades solely on aspiration or comfort. Viewers want jeopardy. They want tension. Ideally, they want to be feet-up on the sofa, tea in hand, while a stranger visibly sweats over a sauce refusing to emulsify.

The Heat understands this perfectly. The problem is not that the format feels contrived, but that it is presented as even remotely realistic. The first episode wastes little time clarifying the programme’s priorities. Novelli greets the contestants with the reassuringly enigmatic declaration: “You are here because I can smell potential.” One suspects he can also detect the faint aroma of reality-TV hormones, because the kitchen drama is swiftly intercut with Big Brother-style confessionals in which contestants muse less on seasoning than romantic prospects. “I’m in my dating era,” announces one.