“I think I am perpetually in a midlife crisis,” observed UN cake inspector Paul Hollywood last year, much as the Pope might self-identify as Catholic. Is Paul right? Rarely pictured offscreen wearing anything but motorcycle leathers, The Great British Bake Off judge certainly has the air of someone who has downloaded the Headspace app and is thinking about a Route 66 tattoo.
The most recent off-Bake Off story we heard about Paul, 52, saw him caught up in a wider New York Times exposé about people buying bots as Twitter followers. It was a bit too technical for me to get my head around, but for a feel of how quite bang Paul was to rights, you could do worse than his spokesman’s comment to the paper: “Paul deleted his personal account last week.” OK, got it. Whether his new girlfriend, 22, should have done the same with her Insta is a matter of debate. But we’ll come to Summer Monteys-Fullam shortly.
Before we go on, I must remind you of the First Law of Thermomix, which states that there is a finite amount of midlife crisis in the telly cooks community. It can be neither created nor destroyed; it can only be passed from one of them to the other, like a really great guacamole recipe. Each will add their own twist to it, of course, but the ur-recipe – the ur-crisis – is the same. A chap who aggressively critiques civilian cooking efforts on telly will make an absolute dog’s dinner of a situation, while stubbornly claiming it all tastes great to him.
In his head: the image of Steven Seagal in Under Siege, a highly decorated ex-Navy Seal (“Security clearance revoked after Panama”), who also cooks, and is able both to dispatch villains using kitchen knives and turn a microwave into an improvised weapon, all the while knowing he’s having Erika Eleniak for his pudding.
In everyone else’s head: the image of Seagal now.
For some of our telly chefs, the condition is high-functioning. Gordon Ramsay has been having a rolling midlife crisis since he was 18, when – contrary to his recollection – he wasn’t actually in the Rangers first team squad. For others, things build to a point of dramatic reckoning. Ready Steady Cook star Antony Worrall Thompson started shoplifting at Tesco, you may recall, later explaining that the temptation of pinching stuff at the self-service tills had been “something that sparked my naughtiness, my desire to live on the edge”.
Sorry, Jimmy Dean, but there’s only one place not paying for two tubs of coleslaw and a ciabatta is going to take you, and that’s a rural Oxfordshire cop shop. Thankfully, as Antony later revealed: “The police were very nice, wanted to keep all the other hoods away from me.” But the nick experience is still “not nice. I couldn’t say to them: ‘May I borrow a magazine, or can I read a book?’” When the reality of the incarceration crisis hits you, it hits you hard.
Anyway. Undisputed master of the telly chef midlife crisis is, of course, MasterChef’s Gregg Wallace. Currently married to wife No 4, Gregg likes to give regular tell-all interviews on Where He’s At with the women in his life. Last year, he was explaining how he didn’t care to venture to not “nice places” like shopping centres, because of what people might think of his much-younger wife. Spoken like a great protector, and one familiar with how the famous jibe goes: “There’s no fool like a young fool.”
Remarkably, though, this self-publicised-telly-chef-midlife-crisis column is not actually about Gregg. Back, then, to Paul Hollywood, whose new-ish girlfriend wrote an Instagram tribute to him at the turn of the year. One aspect of Summer Monteys-Fullam’s tribute to her “amazing boyfriend” has now caught people’s unfavourable attention: namely, the bit where she says he has “turned me from a girl to a woman, and to a house woman”. She followed that with a cry-laughter emoji – and why not? The precise emoji for that sentence has arguably yet to be invented, and may indeed never be.
As for the reaction to this … well, let’s just say it could have gone better. It was, of course, the poet Juvenal who used his Satires to pose the eternal question: who judges the telly cooking judges? The answer, evidently, is “a hell of a lot of people on the internet”. And if Paul and Summer currently feel like getting on his Kawasaki Ninja H2 and disappearing into the American west, I’m sure we could all quite understand it.
Past performance is no guarantee of Steven Seagal’s worth
What we might term the No-Shit Intro of the Month comes courtesy of Fortune magazine, which opens a story with the words: “Regulators in New Jersey and Tennessee are sending clear signals that investors should steer clear of a cryptocurrency endorsed by faded action-film star Steven Seagal.”
Ya think? In what my made-up market analysts are calling a clear signal that “nothing’s blue chip any more”, Seagal’s Bitcoin knock-off has run into a series of strong regulatory warnings.
Like me, you may be collecting a series of one-fact stories from the past couple of years that you plan to go back in time with and freak out your 2014 self. In which case, you’ll already be across the reality that Above the Law legend Seagal is the spokesmodel for a cryptocurrency. The news was exclusively revealed by the project’s website, which went with “ZEN MASTER STEVEN SEAGAL HAS BECOME THE BRAND AMBASSADOR OF BITCOIIN2GEN.” Which is presumably more enticing to investors than “VLADIMIR PUTIN’S JUDO PATSY HAS BECOME THE BRAND AMBASSADOR OF BITCOIIN2GEN”. Or any of the other even more malarial options for this most multi of all multihyphenates.
As you can see, its name is Bitcoiin – with two “I”s - which strikes me as the cryptocurrency equivalent of calling your cab firm AAAAAAAAAA Taxis back in the anciente tymes of the Yellow Pages. Quite how this cryptocurrency has been red-flagged as potentially risky for investors is beyond me. According to Bitcoiin, Seagal “believes that what he does in his life is about leading people into contemplation to wake them up and enlighten them in some manner”. Do go on. “These are precisely the objectives of the Bitcoiin2Gen.”
That was the point at which I went all-in, but for the ultra-timid investor, there was more: “Zen Master Steven mentioned an old Chinese saying: ‘Flow with whatever may happen and let your mind be free. Stay centred by accepting whatever you are doing. This is the ultimate,’ by Chuang Tsu.”
Amazing. Apparently, in the interests of balance, I have to mention a less old saying by the New Jersey Bureau of Securities, which goes: blah blah cease and desist, blah blah “fraudulently offering unregistered securities in violation of the Securities Law”.
Whatever. I know which type of financial advice I feel spiritually closer to. News that Seagal is now departing his spokesmodel role in order that the currency may remain “genuinely anonymous” is only further proof of its – and his – integrity. Pile in, readers, and let the pyramid-shaped journey to financial enlightenment commence.
