Sometimes it’s hard to understand just why certain TV shows become successful, while others fail. The recent boom in ratings for celebrity and non-celebrity dinner hosting programmes is one such example; nobody could predict such a thing being popular at the moment. Whether dinner party themed TV programmes are a good or a bad thing, they inevitably raise the question: did we, as consumers, somehow indicate that this was what we want to watch? The likelihood is that we did; it seems more difficult to believe that the major TV channels just dreamt it up and were satisfied with it.
Again, whether it is good telly or not depends on point of view, but most people would agree that watching others having dinner is less exciting than, perhaps, enjoying your own one. But then again most reality-tinged TV shows have this same attraction; it’s certainly not as exciting as being in the fitted kitchen with the clock ticking and a perfect dish to cook before a vicious Michelin-star chef, but is that what we all would want to with our time off?
Maybe it’s the fact that, though we like the idea of opening our kitchen and ourselves up to a panel of judges, we much prefer the fantasy, and so leave the nail-biting conclusions to the people on the box. It could be a reason as to why so many people watch these kinds of shows. Furthermore, it speaks of a kind of stilted elegance that is rapidly fading, generally for the good, that of the masterful housewife regularly catering effortlessly for groups of friends, where she is constantly valued by what she brings from the kitchen. We don’t want to live that way any more, but the desire to be so competent as a host or hostess isn’t likely to vanish all that quickly.
Still, they could do a lot to improve the colour of these rather formulaic shows. There could be a medieval version. Forget Blumenthal, just get regular folk together for a feast of roast swan, peacocks stuffed with curlews, with lark’s tongues in jelly. Who knows what the outcome would be? It would certainly make the nervous intermediary passages a little more interesting: “I’m almost there, I’m just a little nervous about how best to serve the boars’ heads…”
There’s an idea in there somewhere. Maybe do away with the tiny courses ringed with balsamic reduction, and go straight in for what people want. There could be a competitive element in both who can cook the largest, most vast spread, and who of course can do the best job of eating it. Maybe, as a result of recession, we are turning not towards frugality but the opposite, to the memory of excess, to the hearth of our kitchens always firing, and on the television the celebrities doing the same as us.