This week Netflix announced plans to introduce a button that permits viewers to edit out all the Trump jokes in Seth Myers’s new comedy special (OK boomer, who’s a snowflake now?), while they also floated an update that will allow you to speed up or slow down the show you’re watching.
Bingeing box sets at 1.5 times the speed is sure to be just the tip of the iceberg. Soon, we’ll all be watching shows tailor-edited to meet our rarefied tastes. Think House of Cards with all Kevin Spacey’s bits filled in by a CGI Frank Underwood. The Sound of Music without the Nazis. Friends minus Joey.
The BBC, though, somehow found a way to present my own personal worst nightmare without extrapolating my data.
You know that anxiety-riven dream in which you are to have a Spanish exam (or the like) in half an hour, and have only just realised you’ve never had a single lesson? Quel dommage! Si, claro.
This is also poor Michael’s story. The Spanish exam here is MasterChef: The Professionals, and the crucial knowledge he’s lacking is somewhat more niche.
“I’ve never done a mousseline before,” he stutters to Monica Galetti, who glares back at the stricken chef as if he’s standing in front of an auditorium with no trousers on. “I’ve never been around pastry much”.
Um, this is Professionals, pal. The stuff of true kitchen nightmares. I really felt for Michael, though, sweating (or perhaps crying) into a roux that, ultimately, wasn’t even cooked. Then I agonised for Neil, just 20, as he freaked out over a hollandaise while a cackling Gregg Wallace barked “Where’s yer accent from?”
I can’t listen while I cook, either. Just ask my last dinner guests who told me about their dietary requirements.
With competitive-format TV, perhaps you have to see it to be it. Try as I might, I can’t set my topless bod on a mind’s eye Love Island. I really can’t cook without a recipe book either, and so MasterChef: The Professionals sets a high bar.
Masterchef: The Professionals is on BBC Two at 8pm tonight.
