TV food shows we want to watch again

So, Ready Steady Cook is back on free-to-air TV tonight in all its garish suburban glory, and there’s nothing wrong with that. RSC is The Price is Right of cooking shows – all about stirring the audience up into a mild frenzy and seeing ordinary Australians getting way too excited. Like the jerry-rigged dishes whipped up on the show, it’s comfort food in TV form – even if it is a throwback that seems so much a product of the early 2000s that watching the new one feels like actual time travel.

Then again, there’s surely more rationale for bringing back the tomato-and-pepper extravaganza than for the recent revival of Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. It seemed like the culinary curse merchant had long ago exhausted every possibility for going into terrible restaurants, alternately screaming at and hugging everyone who worked there, and then magically producing a full house of diners who have only come to eat there because they know Gordon Ramsay’s in the kitchen. Somehow he’s found even more restaurant owners who are willing to humiliate themselves in return for a brief bump in business before the deep-seated problems with their business, unable to be solved in a week of reality TV, send them to the wall anyway.

But if we’re going to start bringing back food shows that we’d assumed had long been buried, let’s really lean into this. Let’s bring back the screen fare we are truly craving.

Iron Chef (The OG)

Why, for example, are they not still making Iron Chef? And I’m not talking about American Iron Chef, or any of the numerous spin-offs. I’m talking about the OG Iron Chef, the Japanese juggernaut of the ’90s: the cut-throat bloodsport-esque cooking tournament hosted by a capsicum-biting lunatic. Seeing the challengers go up against one of the Iron Chefs – be they experts in French, Chinese, Japanese or Italian cuisine – to dish up a menu based around the ingredient revealed by Chairman Kaga (aforesaid lunatic) was a riveting experience.

Japanese audiences must’ve lapped it up in its original language, but for us poor dull Westerners, there was an extra treat in the English-language dubbing, which gave every episode the feel of an old Godzilla movie. No other show – including the other versions of Iron Chef – brought the Godzilla vibes, and although it’s been more than two decades since the original series ended, it remains a timeless format that really does need to return.

Come and Get It

Peter Russell-Clarke and his bite-sized show Come and Get It also needs to return. How we of a certain age used to adore the man and bask in the warm paternal glow whenever he bid us “g’day”. Of course, thanks to YouTube, we now know that Russell-Clarke had a much wider – and more adult-oriented – vocabulary than we ever imagined at the time, but that’s exactly why we want him back. Knowing just how fluently Russell-Clarke can let the expletives fly when he wants to adds a different and thrilling texture to his homespun wisdom about eggs and cheese. I understand he’s getting on a bit now, but surely he can still stand behind a bench and make an omelette? If not, let’s just rerun the original episodes so today’s generation can understand that life once had a deeper purpose.

Surprise Chef

Speaking of deeper purpose, if Ready Steady Cook is being revived, surely the time is ripe for a new batch of Surprise Chef. It was the show where hyperactive superchef Aristos Papandroulakis pounced on ordinary shoppers in the middle of Coles and demanded they took him home so he could cook them dinner using whatever ingredients they happened to have. The show provided viewers with plenty of handy hints about how to get the most out of your food budget by cooking delicious meals with simple everyday ingredients. At least I assume it did; I never noticed as I was so mesmerised by Aristos’ unquenchable energy and enthusiasm for his bizarre vocation.

When you actually watched the show enormous doubts tended to fester about just how “surprising” this chef was – the shoppers didn’t seem quite as bewildered as someone who’d had no warning there was a huge Greek lurking around the corner about to offer to cook for them should be. But the phoniness was all part of the marvellously tacky vibe Surprise Chef radiated, and if you’re looking for food TV that doesn’t take itself too seriously, a new series would pair with Ready Steady Cook like a fine wine with … something that a fine wine pairs well with.

Posh Nosh

And speaking of the finer things in life, why did we only ever get one series of Posh Nosh? OK, this isn’t quite the same as the other shows I mentioned, being a scripted comedy about fictional foodie couple Simon and Minty Marchmont, who showcase the very poshest of recipes to “bring extraordinary food to ordinary people”. As such, it doesn’t have a lot to teach the home cook – instructions like “embarrass the vegetables” and “always have a relationship with your meat” aren’t necessarily of great use in our own kitchens.

However, they’re only very slightly less useful than the tips given in most cooking shows, and in its absurdist skewering of pretentious cooking shows, Posh Nosh was a dream for food lovers with a sense of humour. Plus the performances of Arabella Weir and Richard E. Grant as the passive-aggressive upper-class couple are pitch-perfect. That only nine nine-minute episodes yet exist is criminal. We deserve more!

Cutthroat Kitchen

More rooted in reality, although often just as funny, was Cutthroat Kitchen, hosted by the wry and pretend-cruel Alton Brown. Four chefs compete over three rounds, with one eliminated each round. Before the game begins, each chef is allotted $25,000, with which they can bid as Brown auctions off various items that can be used to sabotage their opponents.

What follows is glorious and gleeful and hilariously mean, as the chefs hamstring each other in all kinds of mad ways, like making them cook meatballs in a children’s ball-pit, forcing a chef to use a hammock as a workstation, or making them get inside a giant hamster wheel to prep their meal. With the creativity of the sabotage-setters seemingly never running dry, the show was always frenetically ridiculous. And a little bit wicked, something that most cooking shows nowadays tend to lack.

Ready Steady Cook is on Ten, Friday, 7.30pm.