“Howdy guys and girls, welcome to Texas,” says the TV chef James Martin, entirely without conviction, from behind the wheel of a massive pick-up truck. It’s the third week of James Martin’s American Adventure (Friday, 8pm, ITV), which sees our host engaged in an uphill battle to convince viewers he’s enjoying himself. So far, there have been sunbaked sojourns around Napa Valley and Santa Monica, bringing with them alfresco cookery, flash wheels, too-tight trousers and a nasty case of sunburn. Next stop is San Antonio, Texas, where, says our hatchet-faced host, “the bustling Mexican vibe brings the place alive”. Martin, though, is dead inside. While the background music is pure mariachi fiesta, his expression screams: “Someone call my agent. When will this nightmare be over?”
We shouldn’t be surprised. There’s nothing that’s not awkward about Martin. He spent 10 years intermittently setting fire to stuff on Saturday Kitchen – which, in retrospect, looks less like a series of culinary cock-ups than a cry for help. Had he lifted a saucepan lid one day to reveal his producer’s head bubbling away with a bouquet garni, few would have been surprised.
But, having recently hightailed it to ITV, Martin has now landed what many would see as the ultimate prize – a cooking show-cum-travelogue that allows him to eat his way across entire countries and hobnob with some of the best chefs in the world. It’s a typical reward for long-serving TV chefs and foodies as they slide inexorably towards midlife crisis (see also The Hairy Bikers’ Mediterranean Adventure, Jamie’s Great Escape, and every Rick Stein show ever made). But away from the demands of live television, and thousands of miles from home, Martin is struggling to work up an appetite.
“We’re not built for extreme heat in Yorkshire,” he says plaintively from behind his workstation in San Antonio’s Market Square, damp patches spreading across his shirt. It’s hotter than Satan’s bum crack here, though producers have nonetheless seen fit to park him in front of a giant barbecue in order to work his magic on a slab of salmon. Rather than being offered something useful like an electric fan, he’s given a fresh shirt and a miniature bottle of tequila and left to sweat it out in front of the nation.
Elsewhere, along with a cursory two-minute history of the city, we get shots of Martin driving down a highway in his pick-up, Martin rocking a sombrero, and Martin, by now resembling a belligerent radish, scouring San Antonio for some air-con. For penetrating insight into Tex-Mex culture, this is up there with Looney Tunes’ Speedy Gonzalez. His final dish, once again cooked out in the square, is barbecued rib-eye steak and corn on the cob. Fully basted in sweat and despair, Martin can barely string a sentence together. After accidentally setting fire to the corn husks and splattering his already soaked shirt in fat, he whacks the steak on a plate, glowers at the camera, turns on his heels and walks away. Martin may know about food, but lighting up the screen with his wit and charisma apparently isn’t in his job description. Someone get the man a beer and a ticket home.
