I love Michel Roux Jr

For the past month I have been glued to the BBC’s Why Poverty? season — ‘part of an unprecedented collaboration between public service media in which 37 EBU members have been dedicating multiplatform programming on the theme of poverty’.

No, I jest. What I’ve actually been watching is MasterChef. Served with a MasterChef reduction, a smear of MasterChef purée, MasterChef shavings, MasterChef pickles and MasterChef tapenade and pommes, style Masterchef. With more MasterChef for pud, obviously.

Does this make me a bad person? Well, possibly. But it also makes me a normal person. I didn’t watch any of the Poverty stuff because, frankly, the very last thing I need after another rubbish day toiling away in front of my screen for next to no money is to sit watching poor people being poor and, worse, being made to feel as though their plight is somehow my fault which, I’m sorry, it’s not and I don’t see why the BBC has any business using my licence fee to tell me that it is.

MasterChef, on the other hand, makes me feel not necessarily much better about myself but at least quite pleasantly numbed. ‘Let’s go to bed and have some Soma,’ said the Fawn to me the other night. And I knew exactly what she meant. We’d take her iPad upstairs and lull ourselves into a moronic stupor listening to Gregg tell us once again what a sucker he is for a proper old-fashioned pudding made with cream, lard, treacle and goose fat and the contestants telling us how incredibly much it matters that they should make it to the next round so that this time they can really show Michel Roux Jr what they’re capable of.

Then it’s over and it’s another hour of your life gone.