THE VIEW FROM DOWN UNDER: If the celebrity chef thought that Australia would laugh off his crude �humour� he was wrong. Caitlin Crowley explains why

Like a recipe for a soufflé, it's all in the timing. And Gordon Ramsay's was well off when he insulted Australian journalist Tracy Grimshaw last week. The furore surrounding the chef, television personality and serial loudmouth began lightly enough on Friday when Ramsay fronted up for a four minute puff-piece on Channel Nine's A Current Affair.

Let me furnish you with some context. Channel Nine could just as easily be called Channel Bloke, Channel Beer, Broads and Footy or Channel Lowest Common Denominator. If Channel Nine were male he'd have tanned leathery skin, wear crocodile skin Cuban-heeled boots and suck in his well-fed gut when Kirsty from publicity walked past. The Age's Catherine Deveny describes the station as: "Morally bankrupt, ethically barren, creatively deficient and run by insecure men who infantilise and sexualise women at every opportunity." Harsh? Perhaps, but you get the idea.

And A Current Affair (ACA) is Nine's tea-time weeknight crack at foot-in-the-door journalism. If you like your television programmes trashy, lurid and stuffed with girls pulling each other's hair - but you don't get home in time for The Bold And The Beautiful - then ACA is the next best thing.

In recent weeks the programme has featured stories about mothers and daughters (We want plastic surgery to look just like Barbie!), weight-loss ice-cream (It's not only low fat but will blast fat away!) and slag fights at the local high school (Get her! Break her nose, Tamara). Low on genuine current affairs but bursting with grainy mobile phone footage. You get my drift.

Ramsay's interview with ACA's host Tracy Grimshaw was the Friday night feel-good piece. Tabloid telly by the numbers. Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares and Hell's Kitchen are both screened on Nine, so an ACA pop-in was just standard cross-promotion. Ramsay played Ramsay - he was laddish, flirty and just a little bit naughty as he teased Grimshaw about a mole on her lip. Grimshaw asked the tough questions: had Ramsay become arrogant? Ramsay ruffled his hair and asked Tracy what turned her on. He called her my darling, she called him a charmer. They kissed goodbye and their obligations were done.

They appeared to genuinely like each other. Only Ramsay knows why the next day at the Good Food And Wine Show he insulted Grimshaw by likening her to a pig and in a new low suggested she visit Simon Cowell's botox doctor. You might well make swine jokes Gordon, but could we leave that white-toothed creepy Simon Cowell out of it?

Since the row blew up it has emerged that, before entering the studio, Ramsay fired off a volley of sexist remarks to other female Nine network staff. Footage aired by A Current Affair showed him telling one woman in a dressing room: "Turn round the other way. I don't want to see your fat a***." He also advised a female reporter to rub olive oil on her nipples before running in a marathon.

IF Ramsay had made his remarks a month ago then the Australian public might have laughed off his ridiculous outburst. Just one media whore having a stab at another. Typical Channel Nine - any publicity's good publicity. But something happened just a month ago that placed ACA, and in particular Grimshaw, in a different league and won her the hearts of many Australians.

On May 13 Grimshaw took on Channel Nine stablemate, former rugby league player and television personality Matthew Johns, in a searing, highly viewed interview. What was it about? Seven years ago, in New Zealand, Johns had taken part in a sport pack-sex incident that involved several of his Cronulla Sharks team-mates and a 19-year-old girl.

The Grimshaw-Johns interview was one of the most riveting Australian interviews seen in recent times. Our perceptions of the station, the show and Grimshaw as lightweight were thrown out the window. Nine could have given the story a cursory nod and dismissed the gravity of the issue with a heartfelt apology and left it to the national broadcaster to deal with the issue and write off the coverage as being earnest. But it didn't. Grimshaw was taking on a much-loved Australian sportsman, a colleague and all, with his wife sitting beside him. Grimshaw was composed, calm and rational and spoke for millions of people who were fed up with sportsmen getting away with bad behaviour.

When Gordon Ramsay chose to make unflattering comments about an Australian personality he couldn't have chosen a more inappropriate time or a more inappropriate target than someone who had just taken on an Aussie icon and established herself as the reality pill Australian current affairs and football lad culture needed. Bad form Gordon, bad form.

That's not to say A Current Affair didn't wring every last ounce of footage out of the incident. There was unedited behind-the-scenes footage of Ramsay insulting the make-up artists and, worse, the cleaning lady. Shaky camera footage showed Ramsay on his morning jog, a security guard asking the film crew to leave Ramsay's hotel and an eventual extended apology from Ramsay. Grimshaw wrapped it up with a final editorial - the apology had been made and she had accepted it.

Ramsay, for his part, has no plans to tone down his language. "I can't edit myself. I am what I am," he said late last week, while visiting Queensland's Gold Coast. He added: "It has been a tough week, and having that level of scrutiny, it gets a little bit tiring after a while. You go through the motions and you apologise - calling any lady a pig is not pleasant - but you get on with it."

Gordon Ramsay is a favourite in Australia; he appeals to our larrikin spirit and our love of swearing. He is like our country: weather-beaten, rough and colourful. We like to think of ourselves as low on protocol and high on entertainment, not unlike Ramsay himself. There was a period last year when Ramsay was on our screens nearly every night - and the ratings were high.

On this occasion Ramsay misread the cultural landscape, but Aussies are forgiving. We will watch his shows, buy his books and laugh at his jokes. And no-one will be surprised when he pops up for another spot of light-hearted banter with Grimshaw on his next visit.

Aussie lad mag Zoo Weekly has just offered Grimshaw $50,000 to get her kit off for their readers. Grimshaw has declined. We want Ramsay to come here and be himself, we just don't want him being a pig; we have enough of our own.

Caitlin Crowley is a writer from Melbourne, Australia

***

This idiotic man unravelling in front of us isn't the Gordon I met
By Susan Swarbrick

What on earth made Ramsay do it? While he's never been one to shy away from controversy, this is an entirely new low for the TV chef who has become as famous for his fiery, shouty and sweary alpha male persona as his Michelin-star cooking. It's also one which is somewhat at odds with his less outlandish off-screen persona.

A little over a year ago I interviewed Ramsay in Dubai. It was a time when he appeared to have the world at his feet, a decade of hard work finally coming to fruition. He had opened his first restaurant in Paris (well, technically Versailles) at the Trianon Palace, unveiled the $10m Gordon Ramsay at The London (West Hollywood) in Los Angeles and a debut airport outlet, Gordon Ramsay's Plane Food, at London Heathrow Terminal 5. He spoke animatedly of plans for potential ventures in Switzerland, Germany, Australia and Qatar, said he was looking at a second site in Paris, locations in Chicago and Toronto, and also talked about opening a grill-style restaurant in Edinburgh.

For all his success, though, Ramsay was only too aware of his detractors and talked disparagingly about those who he believed would like to see him fail. "Unfortunately there is a tall poppy syndrome," he said. "Everyone thinks you're spreading yourself too thin but the majority of chefs I know can't run a bath let alone 18 restaurants across the world."

It was tough talk, yet, if truth be told, the Ramsay I encountered was a fairly inoffensive, affable creature. Flamboyant, yes; confident verging on arrogant, at times, definitely; but not the bullying, oppressive character we have grown used to seeing on television. Away from the heat of the kitchen he was charm personified. Disappointingly, he swore very little, his sentences littered with "Christ almighty", "Jesus" and the occasional "holy mackerel".

After our initial interview I spent the best part of a day with Ramsay and his wife Tana on a fishing trip off the coast of Dubai and was pleasantly surprised by his relatively sunny disposition. He came across as witty, gregarious and - perhaps in small doses - likeable. The only time he came close to losing his temper was when our photographer, suffering from seasickness, decided to lie splayed out on the deck, meaning Ramsay had to clamber over him to reach his rod and twice missed out on landing a catch.

We had to return to shore almost empty-handed and all Ramsay had to show off to the waiting photographers was a sole barracuda. Unfortunately the sun had dried it out and it looked distinctly plastic. "It's not a real fish," he joked. "We had divers come up under the boat and hand it to us." Even so, his ego was clearly bruised.

Ramsay likes to shock and is a skilled raconteur. Over lunch he told an anecdote about his children Molly, 11, and Jack and Holly, both nine. "Holly can be really naughty," he said. "We were doing this interview for 60 Minutes in Australia and they asked the kids what they wanted to be when they grow up. Jack said a footballer or chef, Megan said a vet then Holly whipped up her top and said, topless model'." Next to him Tana chipped in: "We'd had the builders in and I think she found their copy of The Sun a few too many times."

I witnessed a real closeness between him and Tana that day. Earlier, as they stood at the back of the boat, the wind whipping through their hair, they seemed a perfect fit. It is an image that now seems somewhat adrift given the allegations which surfaced earlier this year that Ramsay had an affair with author Sarah Symonds.

One of the few times Ramsay visibly bristled during our interview was when asked about using his fame as a tool to promote himself. "Nothing of the sort. I don't go round promoting myself," he claimed. "Fame is a disease. I'm not tarnished with any form of fame ... the fame thing, that's all weird. You don't cook to become famous. How sad would you be?"

It became apparent Ramsay is someone who likes to have things both ways - or rather his way: to lap up the attention when the going is good, then complain about media intrusion when the coverage doesn't suit him. When I met Ramsay he complained about his treatment in the press.

The latest controversy rumbling on isn't the first time he has locked horns with the antipodeans. In early 2008, Ramsay caused public outcry with senators, schools and parent groups objecting to his liberal use of expletives before the watershed (and this is in a country where you can swear in parliament). When I asked him then about his caricatured public profile, Ramsay made a chopping motion with his hand and a sharp zipping whistling sound. "Over it. Long gone. Am I the only chef who admits to swearing?" he said. "Can I just say I'm not a broadcaster? I'm a chef. So if Australia decides to put Kitchen Nightmares out there at 8.30pm and a chef in California calls me a Scottish twat, I don't control that but yet I get the flack for it."

He proudly described himself as "thick-skinned" and "very Scottish, very durable". Given the many storms and controversies he has weathered over the years, Ramsay is certainly made of robust stuff: the Weeble that wobbles but won't fall down. The Ramsay of the past week, though, seems poles apart from that, a man unravelling before our very eyes. His boundaries, or rather lack of them, have been jarring and utterly despicable. Whether he'll bounce back remains to be seen. Although if anyone can make silk from a sow's ear - pardon the pig reference - it's Gordon Ramsay.