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Senior moments

Simon Hoggart

Wednesday, 27th August 2008

New Tricks (BBC1); Mutual Friends (BBC1); Masterchef: the Professionals (BBC1)

Still, it’s funny, it’s smart, it’s crisply scripted and it’s cheerful. It deserves to be number one, and for the first time (I believe) the BBC, having treated it with embarrassment and disdain, has announced that it will be back next year. Somewhere a marketing man is flouncing round in a huff.

The characters in Mutual Friends (BBC1, Tuesday) are probably a quarter century younger than New Tricks’ cops, but the elderly clichés are already in place. There’s The Big Chill-style funeral of an old friend at which things are said that would have been better left unsaid, the married couple in therapy cliché, and of course the scene where Dad misses the school play — cue close-up of little boy’s crumpled face. It works, I suspect, because the cast play it as a comedy rather than a drama: Andrew Alexander looks as if he is permanently about to announce that it’s Pimm’s O’Clock, and Marc Warren, who usually plays neurotic sleazeballs, shows real deftness as a neurotic almost honest lawyer. If it were an attempt to recreate Cold Feet it would be boring — as a series of set comic pieces, it works.

MasterChef: the Professionals (BBC2, Monday) is the third twist on the formula, this time featuring not amateurs, not celebs, but up-and-coming cooks who are already being paid. I found it hard to care very much. John Torode, one of the judges, has been replaced by Michel Roux Jr from Le Gavroche, who plays Mr Nasty to Gregg Wallace’s Mr Sometimes Quite Encouraging. They must be desperate for yet more new angles. Maybe MasterChef: the Ex-presenters, starring Torode and Loyd Grossman? Or Greasy Spoon: the MasterChefs in which Marco-Pierre White, Gordon Ramsay and Heston Blumenthal cook fried-egg sandwiches.