Reality shows are about human meat – sad, expectant contestants paraded on television for a few weeks before being dumped and forgotten about. But now BBQ Champ (STV, Friday, 9pm) has taken the idea literally and given us the real thing: genuine pieces of meat piled up for the camera: shoulder, rump, leg. I can't think of anything more symbolic of the reality format than this: raw meat cooked, burnt, and cut up.
The challenge for the show and its eight contestants was to cook the meat barbecue style, which either means grilling or smoking – or as the programme makers would prefer, grillin' or smokin'. The word barbecue also gets shortened to BBQ or, in the case of one of the judges, Adam Richman, to just Q, because who has time these days to say three letters? It was all very irritatin'.
You might remember Richman from his show Man Vs Food in which he was challenged to eat as much as he could – it was a show about quantity over quality, but the American does seem to know his stuff on food. He is also very enthusiastic and excitable about pretty much everything he sees or hears – I feel sorry for his exclamation marks; they must be exhausted from over-use.
Richman is one of the two judges on the show – the other is the chef Mark Blatchford - and the format follows most of the elements of Masterchef and The Great British Bake-Off very closely indeed. There are shots of a big country house, there are potted interviews over the ingredients and two judges making the final judgement; there is even a grill-off.
However, these familiar elements are ultimately the undoing of BBQ Champ. Anyone who has switched on the telly for more than a few minutes in the last three years will be very familiar with the tone, pace, structure and clichés of Masterchef and Bake-Off so to see them again in a new show immediately kills off any originality. It goes up in flames before the whole thing has even got going.
The only new element is that the food in this show is barbecued but even here there are limits. Some of the contestants are talented, but there are only so many ways you can barbecue food, which means what we get is big slabs of meat cooked over coal, again and again and again. One of the best elements of a good cookery show is that we learn something and take a few facts away in a doggy bag, but what are we supposed to learn from this?
And there's another problem. Myleene Klass may be the presenter of BBQ Champ, but the bombastic, brash, cocky, and essentially male tone of the show will become tiresome before long. Masterchef is a little guilty of the same thing, but the success of Bake-Off is its gentleness and slow pace, which makes a long series bearable. In fact, I wonder if the problem with BBQ Champ is that barbecues are still a rather foreign idea in Britain. Yes, we make the odd effort one day in August when it's not raining, but cooking in this way, and watching others do it, is too loud, too unsubtle. Maybe ultimately, it's just a little bit too American.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here