Will Marco Pierre White make good TV? Well, he has a celebrity chef's charisma, is well-mannered, is free and forceful with his opinions, has a handsome, powerful presence - and is possibly the most frightening man I have ever met.
It is not that White readily rises to anger in a hail of expletives, like rival chef Gordon Ramsay.
It is just that he gives the impression that rage always lurks just beneath the surface - just like a great white shark whose only visible presence is that of a shiny black dorsal fin slicing through the water.
This morning at the press event to announce White is to star in Hell's Kitchen, the ITV chef training reality show, the man from the Mail brings up the three starred Michelin chef's much-publicised split from his wife.
White calmly offers to throw him out of the restaurant. Or as he puts it, "Do you want to the be first person evicted from Hell's Kitchen?" before following with "do you have a question that you want to ask?" The journalist does, but it isn't about the chef's personal life.
White is in an expansive mood at his restaurant Luciano's on St James Street, commandeering a corner table near the front door, damning fellow celebrity chefs and their TV activities while rejecting an orange juice brought up by a waiter and requesting a coffee, then rejecting a proffered cappuccino and demanding a filter coffee.
On TV chefs, he says that "I can't knock someone for making a living" but also says that Jamie Oliver's appearance at Number 10 with his petition on healthy school dinners was "silly". The campaign hasn't worked, he says, because giant catering companies still control the catering in schools.
Oh, and he hasn't spoken to Gordon Ramsay in years. "If someone doesn't enrich my life then I don't want them part of my life."
How will the celebrities that will appear on Hell's Kitchen be able to cope with his exacting standards, particularly as some of them are bound to be, to put it politely, completely and utterly hopeless?
White, who has been out of the kitchen front line for seven years and never watched the programme before, will have to mould 10 celebrity trainees to cook 70 covers each night for guests for two weeks.
He gets slightly misty-eyed over the prospect of training up his chefs.
"The kitchen is the last bastion, it's the foreign legion. It accepts anyone. You don't need qualifications. The door is always open. It is up to you what you do."
"I prefer to cook than to shout," he also declares. How very lucky for the 10 so far uncast celebrities that will bravely front up for the programme when it broadcasts later in the year.
But beware. If what was on display today is any indication, White will make mincemeat of them without even needing to pick up any cutlery.
Will White be more of a devil than Ramsay? Would we have preferred Worral-Thompson? John Torode's Masterchef is a surprise teatime hit for BBC2. And what about Ainsley Harriott? Who is the king of the reality kitchen?
