Bitter and twisted
James Delingpole
With each new day, I become more and more twisted with rancour, regret and self-hatred over my continuing failure to make something of my life. I used to think that being a hugely witty and original writer would be enough to see me through, but I've begun to realise, possibly too late, that talent just isn't enough these days and probably never was, What you really need in order to get on is that will to power and consuming shamelessness you find in people like Gordon Ramsay.
Now Gordon Ramsay is quite possibly the most brilliant chef of his generation, but does he go: 'God has given me a wonderful gift and I must hone my art every day, and if I scrape a living from it, so much the better'? Does he, fuck (as Gordon would no doubt say, so I think I'm allowed the swear word). How Ramsay goes is: 'OK, so I can cook. So bloody what, It's not going to get me my second Ferrari, is it? I need to become a trademark. I need to become so big that even common northerners, who wouldn't know what foie gras was if you smeared it on to a chip butty and served it in clogs at a pigeon-fanciers convention, know who I am. I need to do more TV. More TV . . '
So that's what he's done — Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares (Channel 4, Tuesday) being his latest — and jolly telegenic he is, too. I do find his swearing and relentless nastiness a bit much, and I speak as one who swears an awful lot (or used to until he heard his three-year-old daughter struggling to articulate the F-word). But there are times when you feel that, compared with what the situation deserves, Ramsay is a model of charm and restraint. His performance with a young would-be superchef called Tim at Bonapartes restaurant in Silsden, West Yorkshire was one of them.
Tim, Ramsay quickly ascertained, had two major problems. First, his overfussy gastronomic creations were not necessarily best suited to the dingy basement of a bar in an untrendy northern market town. Second, he couldn't cook. Invited to prepare a simple three-course dinner for his family, he couldn't even manage the onion soup without torching the croutons. And when Ramsay asked to taste his signature dish, Tim actually managed to serve him a rancid scallop, which Ramsay was duly shown puking outside.
And it got better. Several rages, tickingsoff and fucking fucks later, Ramsay finally coaxed the useless Tim and his sidekick into the greatest culinary victory of their entire short careers: feeding 50-odd diners, without major disaster, on Valentine's night, This might have provided a nice, happy ending. But, instead, the programme found an even better one. A month later, Ramsay sneaked back to find that Tim had learnt not a single lesson. His fridge was a riot of broken eggs and mould; his attitude was abysmal. Ramsay left in disgust, his production team from Optomen (as in two fat ladies and Jamie Oliver) in tears of joy and gratitude for having been afforded such a splendid piece of road-accident TV.
The Brief (ITV, Sunday) is what critics call 'high-class hokum': preposterous, schematic, telling you nothing whatsoever of any use about real life but nevertheless so slick and engagingly acted you don't much mind. It's about a struggling lawyer (Alan Davies) whose spray-on character traits include gambling, an unsuitable relationship with the wife of a nasty bisexual MP, piano-playing and rumpled integrity.
There were lots of things I didn't buy, such as the scene where this mild-mannered nice guy breaks the nose of a clerk in his chambers (for having bullied one of his juniors) and the one where, because he has treble-booked cases on the same day, his clerk speeds him from London court to London court in a Ferrari (yeah, like that would make any difference in London traffic). And I did nearly puke at the scene where, working late, he shows his thoughtfulness by having a waltz round the office with the doughty old secretary who loves ballroom-dancing, though it's not what it was, not now her husband's dead, etc. But for all that it's great, and I could happily watch it every Sunday night if I had to.
Most consoling programme of the week for me was Born Rich (Channel 4, Tuesday). This documentary about the sons and daughters of the supenvealthy, made by Jamie Johnson — heir to the $700 million Johnson & Johnson fortune — heartwarmingly suggested that, if there's one thing worse than being an impoverished, underappreciated wage-slave hack, it's being so incredibly rich you just don't know what to do with all the money. Apparently, you end up going to places like the nightclub in Southampton where wine costs a minimum of $500 per bottle and you're expected to buy at least two bottles per table. You know everyone because the only people who can afford to go there are people like you. And afterwards, you feel sick with disgust at what a massive waste of money it has been, even by your standards.
Apart from being nauseatingly rich, and mostly messed up, what the young fellow heirs and heiresses he interviewed had in common was an extreme reluctance to talk about money. I think and talk about it all the time. Do you think maybe that's where I'm going wrong?
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