TV reviews: Being Gordon Ramsay, The Curfew and The Tony Blair Story

Welcome to the club, then, the subject of Being Gordon Ramsay (Netflix). The Michelin-star-winning chef has followed the example of best mates David and Victoria Beckham, who had one documentary each. Just as their films were co-produced by Studio 99, a media company founded by the former footballer, Being Gordon Ramsay is produced by Studio Ramsay Global. 

For those who haven’t seen it before, there are endless scenes of Ramsay striding through restaurants effing and jeffing. Far more revealing is the footage from the home front, and in particular the extended interview alongside his wife, Tana. This is Ramsay on the couch in every sense, though never on the ropes. 

Tana is “the foundation”, he says, recalling that she looked like “a young Julia Roberts” when they met. No offence to the current Roberts, of course. Of their six children, ranging in age from 27 to 18 months, four are seen on camera. 

It is to his birth family that Ramsay turns first. Born in Johnstone, the family moved to Stratford-upon-Avon when he was nine. Mum worked three jobs, his father was an alcoholic, and his brother a heroin addict. Ramsay has been open about it all and is the same here. “I’m not embarrassed by my past. I got dealt a dysfunctional hand. Big ******* deal.”

Yet the past can still make him emotional. While he knows his mother is proud of him, his late father said cooking was “for women”.

“Never once did I get to sit down at a table and say, ‘That’s for my dad’.” With Ramsay, the kid on free school meals, everything comes back to food.

Yet even after all he has achieved, he still takes criticism to heart. He retells the story about kicking a critic and his guest, Joan Collins, out of his restaurant because of a poor write-up. He doesn’t name the writer, but it was the late AA Gill, and it was almost 30 years ago. “I know it was wrong,” he concedes, but then adds: “That’s what happens when women like Joan Collins come to dinner with knobheads.” Give it a rest, mate.

Tana does a nice line in telling it like it is. “He drives me mental,” she says as her husband returns from another long trip abroad. When she discovers that Ramsay was plagued at school by Jilted John’s Gordon is a Moron, she asks if they’ve chosen the music for the opening titles yet. 

You won’t find anything here about a reported pre-wedding feud with their daughter’s in-laws or any other unpleasantness. “Tell me about the love you have for your kids,” is about as hardball as the questioning gets. 

For all his candour, Being Gordon Ramsay fails to nail what being Gordon Ramsay means. The film ends with him driving away from the launch party for his new restaurants and floating the idea of Manhattan as the place for his next venture. Flash Gordon, still hungry after all these years. 

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Channel 5 would not be the first place most viewers would look for an ideas-packed dystopian crime drama. A torrid four-parter centred around a new kitchen, maybe.  For that reason alone, The Curfew (Channel 5, Monday-Wednesday) came as a pleasant surprise (or as pleasant as a dystopian crime drama can be).

Based on Jayne Cowie’s 2022 novel After Dark, the tale opens at an unspecified time in the future. Not the flying cars, Minority Report-style future; everything is as it is today except for the curfew of the title. In response to a surge in male violence, parliament has passed a Women’s Safety Act - the first in the world - which forces men to stay indoors, tagged, from 7pm-7am. 

In theory, women should be safer (at least between 7pm-7am). Then a body is dumped outside a women’s centre. The police believe the killer must have been another woman. Detective Pamela Green (Sarah Parish) disagrees, arguing that only a man could have been capable of this level of violence. 

There’s a winning attention to detail at the start. In this brave new world, for instance, men must pass a test before they can live with a woman. One sure way to fail is to demonstrate “weaponised incompetence” - pretending to be bad at cooking, cleaning and other chores to get out of doing them. These writers and their imagination, eh?

Just a pity the same attention to detail is lacking elsewhere. The script is peppered with cliches (another day, another maverick cop). The cast does its best to keep things believable, but it doesn’t help that there are so many faces from EastEnders around. Anita Dobson, Larry Lamb, Lucy Benjamin, Bobby Brazier … Was it an away day? 

Sarah Parish leads the cast of The Curfew as DI Green (Image: Channel 5)

Nearly two decades after leaving office, Tony Blair continues to make headlines with his musings on everything from ID cards to Nato. In case you were able to squeeze in a little more, there was The Tony Blair Story, (Channel 4, Tuesday-Thursday), a new three-part documentary. Besides a long-form interview with the former Labour Prime Minister, the series includes a rare sit-down with his wife, Cherie and the first interviews with the Blair children. 

Those headline-generators apart, why a film about Blair and why now? What is there left to say? Plenty, it turns out, though it’s likely you have heard a lot of it before. 

Director-narrator Michael Waldman begins with a trot through the early years.

There’s a frustratingly brief moment spent on Leo Blair, Tony’s father. Born the son of travelling performers, he was put into the care of a Mr and Mrs Blair “in a poor part of Glasgow”.

A stroke was to cut short Leo’s political career. This, the loss of Tony’s mother while he was at university, and the suicide of a college friend taught the young Blair that “if you’ve got something to do in your life, you'd better get on and do it.”

So begins the depiction of Blair as a man on a mission, someone fated to succeed. Rather than dismiss the notion, Blair feeds it with a story about a premonition of John Smith’s death and the need to be ready for a leadership contest.

“He had a sense of destiny,” says Peter Mandelson, filmed before his part in the Epstein scandal was exposed. 

That same certainty would prove disastrous when applied to  Iraq. Waldman devotes the second film to the war, and does not hold back. How could he? The decision to invade alongside the Americans looks even more deranged today.

If you are expecting an apology, Blair is not offering one, not now, not ever.

There is no grand “Frost/Nixon” moment when Blair admits wrongdoing. If anything, he becomes more adamant that he was right. Anyone who thinks differently - well, that doesn’t bother him. “History goes on a long time,” says the sage of Buckinghamshire. 

Dressed in a beautifully cut blue suit and white shirt with no tie (Keir would approve), Blair looks every one of his 72 years. It doesn’t help that he is interviewed on a stripped-back set that’s filled with moody shadows. Perhaps it was my imagination, but during the messiah section the window grilles seemed to form crucifixes.

Blair as prophet, a cracked actor, a Greek tragedy - the familiar lines are wheeled out by a gallery of talking heads that includes Bill Clinton, Jack Straw, Condi Rice, Alastair Campbell, Max Hastings, Jeremy Corbyn, Clare Short and Robert Harris. Gordon Brown is conspicuous by his absence. 

His children, Euan, Kathryn and Leo (no Nicky), talk about growing up in the glare of publicity. Kathryn is unsparing. “I hated the press,” she says. But it is Cherie, so often voiceless during her husband’s premiership, who is the revelation. Want to know what she thinks of that Lady Macbeth comparison, Gordon’s great expectations, the Iraq demonstration, Tony as a husband? Often, it is what she doesn’t say that speaks volumes.

As the hours went by I kept coming back to why Blair, why now. Even he must know there is no comeback beckoning. Kathryn supplies the answer when she says he is busier than ever. “He’s just not finished and he won’t stop.” It really is all about the headlines, then.