ITV’s Food Glorious Food is under the curse of Simon Cowell

I sometimes worry that ITV — the middle child — doesn’t get enough of my attention and so this week I have decided to redress the balance: I devoted myself to episode one of Food Glorious Food (Wednesday, ITV). It’s a nine-part quest, hosted by Carol Vorderman, which aims to discover ‘Britain’s best-loved recipe’. O jubilate deo!

This is how it goes: treasured family recipes are cooked up at regional events and tasted by one of four judges who choose a favourite and submit it to be tasted by the other three. The judges are Loyd Grossman (smooth), Anne Harrison (stern), Stacie Stewart (bubbly) or Tom Parker Bowles (apologetic). One dish is pronounced victorious — on Wednesday it was a Pimm’s jelly — and it competes again, in a future episode, with other regional winners. The ultimate prize is £20,000 (for the recipe’s owner/manager) and (for the recipe itself) a recording contract with Marks and Spencer — by which I mean that it will be turned into a ready meal and sold from the supermarket shelves.

A quicker way to describe the show would be to say that the head of The Great British Bake-Off had been stitched to the body of Antiques Roadshow and brought to life by an intracardiac shot of X Factor. Need I mention whose genius brain cooked up this gingerbread hybrid? Whose sticky-pie fingers flicked voltage into this particular experiment? ‘I love home cooking,’ says Simon Cowell, ‘which is one of the reasons I wanted to make this show.’ And lo it came to pass: Food Glorious Food was co-produced by Syco Entertainment.

That’s not to say that it’s necessarily awful, but it does provide the product with a useful label. Just as the words ‘made in a factory where nuts are handled’ will cause a certain percentage of the population to treat a packet of biscuits like an unpinned grenade, so will the name ‘Simon Cowell’ inspire some viewers to put down the remote control, switch everything off at the wall and spray the room with Febreze.