So yes, one of our little weaknesses is to watch cheery middleclass aspirational tv, anything that has either some celeb expert showing us how to improve our cooking, homes or lifestyle or some no-hopers being taught the same. In the latter category falls Virgin Cooks, a BBC Three series in which two members of the same family or household, both awful cooks incapable of boiling an egg at the start, are taught to cook properly and compete to win the big prize: to cook a three course meal for assembled family and friends in a real restaurant. A nice idea, not terribly original but entertaining fluff, if it wasn’t for the incredible number of upper middleclass douchebags the show insists on featuring.
Its not as if I didn’t expect a certain bourgeois bias in this sort of show of course, but usually some pretence is made at balance. Here however it seems as if every episode features some of the producers chums, public school boys all, for whom the show is the hardest thing they ever had to do in their lives. It all makes for a great five minute hate…
UPDATE: by which I mean that the contestants featured on the show are largely such knobs that the only enjoyment you can get out of it is by indulging in a spot of class hatred. There certainly isn’t any of the supposed educational content the trailers promised. Compare and contrast with Economy Gastronomy, another supposedly educational aspirational cooking show, again featuring reasonably posh well to do families but there’s a much greater emphasis on actually teaching something, there’s no contrived competition element and last but certainly not least the people eatured may be posh, but they have actual personalities. Virgin Cooks is lazy television, while Economy Gastronomy, unoriginal as it might be, is much better than it needed to be.