Reviews weekly – SPOOKS, THE F-WORD
Another new weekly feature here on the blog. A look at all the weeks biggest shows and their reviews from sites around the web. This week we begin with a look at the return of two shows which have seen better days, Gordon Ramsay’s cooking show The F-Word and BBC1’s spy thriller Spooks.
The F-Word
Lucy Mangan, The Guardian:
Gordon Ramsay’s F Word (Channel 4) returned for its fifth series, pitting two Italian restaurants against each other: Salvo’s in Leeds, run by brothers John and Gip Damone, and Prosecco in Bristol, run by Venetian chef Diego Da Re. Tabloid revelations about Ramsay’s private life and financial restructurings may have threatened to overwhelm the brand, but it seemed business as usual once the competition was underway.
It helped that Diego was such good value. He berated Gordon for not having a black-bristled pastry brush so that he could see if it had left any bristles in his ravioli. He also gave his mentor’s exhor- tations to keep moving short shrift. “The energy is there,” he snapped. “Just let me use it for cooking, yes? Not for conversation.” It was a tasty moment.
As ever, of course, the show’s momentum was arrested by the perennially flavourless celebrity recipe challenge. Katie Price put together her favourite dish: chicken kiev, mashed potato (“I add sugar. Don’t ask me why”) and sweetcorn, which surprised all of us who assumed the plat du Price would involve kebabbed Andre gonads. “Do you want to be on the top or the bottom?” Gordon asked rakishly, opening the oven. “Middle,” she replied with the winsome flirtatiousness of a dead cod. “Are you excited?” he said as they sent their dishes off to the tasters. “Oh yeah, very,” she said in tones of fathomless boredom. “I’m shaking.” You almost felt sorry for the man.
Spooks
Tim Teeman, The Times:
Spooks has returned. The life of a spy’s child was at stake, but it worked out very cleanly without anyone getting dunked into a vat of bubbling, face-melting, boiling fat. How will they ever better that?
Tom Sutcliffe, The Independent:
Family values were relevant in Spooks too, never happier than when it is torturing one of its central characters with the imminent destruction of a loved one. In this case, it was Ruth on the rack, wrenched back from idyllic retirement in Cyprus to have her husband shot in front of her eyes and her adoptive son threatened with the same fate. I haven’t watched Spooks with great diligence recently but I can’t help feeling that around 90 per cent of the team’s energies seem to be spent on rescuing each other from hazards they should never have exposed themselves to in the first place. And “intelligence” is not the quality you would attribute to some of the strategies employed. In this episode, Malcolm presented himself at the baddies’ safe house, announced that he was there without backup and asked them to swap him for the child. Nice one, Malcolm. Now they’ve got a 10-year-old and a valuable MI5 case officer.
