This week, the first new episodes of Ready Steady Cook for a decade are broadcast on BBC One. The miraculous thing is that, watching it, you’d never know that it ever went away.
Sure, some things are little different. The budget for the ingredients has risen from £5 to a colossal £7.50, and they are presented in reusable totes rather than single-use plastic bags. The theme tune now comes with a weird techno burble that makes you feel as if you are playing an imported PlayStation 2 game about different methods of cooking mince. Sumac exists. And there is a new host in Rylan Clark-Neal, continuing his monomaniacal quest to seize and hijack every defunct daytime gameshow made during the 1990s.
But that’s it. That is the extent of the tinkering. Ready Steady Cook is a format so perfect, so completely watertight, that time cannot wither it. This is the same show you watched on school sick days. It’s the same show that gave you a decades-long crush on Fern Britton and convinced you that Ainsley Harriott was the country’s greatest entertainer. Contestants bring a bag of ingredients into a kitchen. A chef has to somehow turn it into dinner in the space of 20 minutes. It doesn’t challenge you. It isn’t designed to be particularly memorable. It remains the sort of studiously inoffensive programme that exists purely to drift before your eyes until you have to go and cook your own dinner.
In truth, I was a little worried about its return. Because, during the decade it was away, the entire landscape of food television has changed completely. Now, largely thanks to Netflix, food shows aren’t really food shows any more. They’re meditative Terrence Malick films about women who stand in wheat fields at dusk and softly whisper koans about the nature of yeast. They’re YouTube videos about rappers shouting at burgers. They’re needlessly macho gameshows where the act of cooking someone’s tea is treated like life or death kabuki theatre.
And yet, it is only by watching Ready Steady Cook after a decade away that you realise how completely influential it was in its time. Its central gimmick – here are some random ingredients, go crazy – has provided the backbone of an internationally primetime show like MasterChef for years now. Its focus on brevity has been reflected in Nigella Express and Lean in 15. Whether we knew it or not, we have been living in Ready Steady Cook’s world all along.
All those qualities are still present for the revival, too. In Monday’s episode, for instance, a chef makes a full batch of doughnuts from scratch in less than 10 minutes, while maintaining a steady level of audience patter. This is staggering – like watching a magic trick. But because this is a quaint little self-effacing Ready Steady Cook, nobody makes a big fuss about it.
There is an honesty to the show that shines through to this day, and an acknowledgement that food is not really worth getting into that much of a flap about. If you pay attention for long enough, you might get a good grounding in what ingredients go with other ingredients and how to improvise your way out of a weirdly stocked fridge, but it is not mandatory. You won’t watch every single episode, but nor will you regret it if you sit down and take a gander when it is on.
Everything still fits. The new chefs already look as if they’ve been doing this for years. Rylan has hit the exact frequency of chit-chat necessary for a show like this. In fact, Ready Steady Cook’s revival is so effortless that you wonder why it even went away. Judged by its own slight ambitions, it is a great success. Now, someone tell Rylan to do Can’t Cook, Won’t Cook.
