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. An hour you could have spent devising the ingenious board game/film plot/start-up concept that solved all your financial problems. Or just reading a book. This thought leaves you feeling slightly soiled and needled with mild self-hatred. But not so much so that you can quite resist the urge to watch the next episode — which is the hallmark of effective format television.

Just possibly, MasterChef: the Professionals (which is the series we’re on now) has the edge over MasterChef: Ordinary, Bog Standard Proles because instead of amiable John Torode it has the scarily gaunt and austere Michel Roux Jr.

I love Michel Roux Jr. Indeed, at least when I’m watching MasterChef, he is the person I admire most in the whole world. (So please don’t anyone tell me that in real life he is a complete bastard or that his cooking’s crap. I don’t want to know and wouldn’t believe you anyway.) There’s a wonderful moment in some episodes where the surviving contestants (those who have passed the skills test with the strict Kiwi woman chef) come face to face with Michel for the first time. On he comes, stubbly, gimlet-eyed, quivering with stiffness like a parade ground Sarnt Major. ‘Ulp!’ the contestants all go. And understandably so, for the high-end restaurant kitchen is probably the one place in civilian life where hierarchy and standards of discipline are as rigorously and unquestioningly observed as in the military.

But Michel is a big softie, really. Though he’s very demanding and magnificently fastidious — especially on presentation, oddly enough, which you would think would come way down the list — he’ll always try to find at least one kind word to say and almost never sticks the boot in the way, say, a critic would.

The critics — Jay Rayner and Charles Campion, particularly — ham it up magnificently. The natural temptation would be to spare contestants’ feelings by saving the eyeball-rolling and lip-curling and icy glowering till after they’d left the room. But these guys —  quite rightly: shows like this are, after all, the equivalent of watching gladiators hacking one another to bits or thieves being hanged — are straight in there with the Olympian disdain. If a contestant has failed he knows it long before he’s made it back to the safety of the kitchen.

What lends a particularly delicious tension to these sequences is that critics are often looking for something completely different from what Michel and Gregg want: comfort food. I remember this from my brief stint as a restaurant critic: it’s the job you want to do more than anything in the world — till you actually get it. Then quickly it becomes a chore. All too often you find yourself scanning menus looking in vain for an item you actually want to order. What you’d like is basic stuff like seared calves liver or maybe a hunk of bleeding meat in a rich morel sauce. But you don’t get it because the chef’s too busy trying to show how fashionably ‘sustainable’ he is, by serving you Pollock — a dreary, tasteless fish which no one would eat out of choice — or some especially weird variety of offal or something pointless plucked from the hedgerow.

I could go on about MasterChef for hours. Well, obviously I could because it’s the only thing I watch. Shame. I’ll bet that Why Poverty? season was just SO moving.