by Neil Simpson
One noticeable thing about Gordon’s opening speeches to the team was the relative lack of swearing. When he laid out the ground rules, he kept his language pretty clean. But anyone who thought he had changed his ways was in for a shock. The effing and blinding was back the moment the celebrities cooked their signature dishes for his analysis. And it wouldn’t go away. When the final count was done, broadcasting authorities said there had been just over 5,000 swear words in the show – almost all of them from Gordon.
Back in the calm before the storm, Gordon introduced the celebrities to his co-chefs, Angela and Mark. They would head up the blue and red teams, which would compete against each other as the early skills of food preparation were learned and the first real meals were cooked. And, after the first few days of training, as the teams got ready for the pressure of pulling off a real restaurant service, Gordon was convinced that everything was going to go well. ‘If the celebrities were soppy and a little bit up their own arse, then I would be concerned,’ he said, when asked about his early impressions. ‘But they are so eager. They are starting to come to terms with the pressure valve and the highs and lows that go on in the kitchen. I really think they’ll get into fifth gear when they need to.’
Unfortunately, storm clouds were already building up on the horizon. ITV had constructed a massive, purpose-built kitchen and restaurant in London’s East End for the main part of the show. It was sited just off the increasingly trendy Brick Lane, more famous for its curries and lagers than for its fine dining. And, by the time the celebrities arrived there, several of them had long since become fed up with the boring, repetitious nature of their early tasks. They were also tired of all the standing up, disoriented by the heat and increasingly angered by Gordon’s perfectionist demands. Mistakes were made, tensions were mounting – and when Dwain Chambers nearly sliced off his finger with a knife the first drops of blood were spilled. It was turning into Hell’s Kitchen indeed.
What some of the television critics – and the celebrities – said at this point was that Gordon was pushing everyone too hard, shouting too loud, asking too much and playing up for the camera at every opportunity. But he refused to compromise or apologise.
‘Everyone was being paid a fortune to be on that show, so I wasn’t going to allow anyone to think they didn’t have to work,’ he said when asked to justify his tough stance afterwards. ‘This show is not about celebrity status and all I am concerned about is their cooking ability or the lack of it. I had seen from day one that they were all out to launch their biographies, careers, CDs, whatever it is, but I wasn’t taking any of it. They are not celebrities on this show and I am not a celebrity chef. I’m a fucking chef. Period. I don’t have a long shot, a wide shot and three times to rehearse the fucking Gordon Ramsay pastry. Everything I do is natural. It’s live. It’s me.’
The one allowance Gordon did make for the celebrities in his charge was that they were like fish out of water in the kitchen – and that he could just about remember how that had felt himself. ‘There are two sides to me when I deal with them all. There is the ugly monster that craves perfection and then there is the other individual who understands what they are going through. I can understand because I’ve done what they are doing now. I was in love with football, but I had to find something else and work at it. I know how hard it is to start again.’
Gordon’s fellow chefs also made the point that his high-profile pupils were hardly shrinking violets who needed to be handled with kid gloves. ‘All of these celebrities are people who have succeeded in their own fields; they are not people who do things lightly. They are in a situation where they are no longer top dog and they are going through emotional turmoil; they are going through hell, but that is what a kitchen is really like,’ said Marcus Wareing.
Mark Sargeant also pointed out that the trainees should be able to see through Gordon’s rages and appreciate how desperately he wanted to inspire them. ‘If he reduces someone to tears, it is not because he has just decided to pick on you. Half the time the people are crying because they know he is right. If you weren’t learning and there wasn’t a flip-side to it, then no one would be interested. But, while the bad side is very bad, the good side is fantastic and that’s why he can make people cry but gain their loyalty in the end.’
A small number of outsiders also argued that Gordon was being more constructive than many critics thought. ‘His full-frontal aggression is as shocking as a smack and if Ramsay used it in the unpredictable manner of a bully it would diminish him as all bullies are essentially weak. But he wields it only to sharpen people up and get the job done,’ wrote journalist Colette Douglas Home in the Daily Mail. And a closer analysis showed there was a lot more to Gordon’s dialogue than an endless stream of swearing. When he tried to describe the texture, colour, taste, appearance and potential of food, there were flashes of real sensitivity and passion in his language. He was desperate to communicate his own feelings for food to the others and there was real poetry in his praise when the trainee chefs did make progress.
And progress was very important because the clock was ticking and the temporary restaurant’s first diners were about to take their seats on the other side of the kitchen wall. One of the extra ingredients which made Hell’s Kitchen work was the contrast between the crises in the kitchens and the rubber-necking that could go on in the main dining room when the evening’s guests arrived. While it may not always have seemed exactly like the hottest ticket in town – the celebrity levels rarely rose above the B-list – the comings and goings of the diners themselves made great television. Angus Deayton had bounced back from being sacked from Have I Got News For You? after a series of newspaper revelations about his private life and was interviewing the diners as they ate. Or, more often, as they waited to eat.
On the first day that Gordon and his celebrities attempted to cook for a full restaurant, just 32 of the 72 diners were served a meal. The late Mo Mowlam left to buy a curry in Brick Lane after waiting two hours for her main course. Even more embarrassing for Gordon was when rival chef Antony Worrall Thompson also gave in to hunger and left the restaurant to try to find food elsewhere. ‘They can’t cope,’ he said of Gordon and his team as he left.
Royal correspondents Jennie Bond and Nicholas Owen were also seen going hungry, while comedian Vic Reeves told Deayton that Gordon had ‘taken umbrage’ when he had asked for egg and chips. ‘I don’t know what his problem is. It was quite a simple order,’ he said sarcastically. Throw the arrival of some newspaper food critics – or ‘fucking food critics’ as Gordon preferred to call them – and the tension could hardly get higher.
‘Disgrace. Fucking disgrace. Fucking ashamed of ourselves. Fucking awful performance. Fucking pissed off’ was his considered opinion of the night. And things didn’t get better very quickly. Over the next few days, arguments in the kitchen got even worse as the celebrities tried to please Gordon and their other mentors in the day and serve all their customers in the evening. What made matters even harder for everyone was that Gordon was starting to feel the pressure of running all his restaurants and fitting in all his other business and family responsibilities.
He would start at Claridge’s at 7am most mornings, spend the day shuttling between it, his other kitchens and Hell’s Kitchen and end up back at Claridge’s around 1.45am to catch up on the day. On the short break between the initial training of the celebrities in west London and the move to the East End, he fitted in a trip to New Zealand to work on an international scholarship he had set up for young chefs three years earlier, and his publishers wanted him to do a jet-lag-inducing one-day book-signing trip to New York to promote Kitchen Heaven as well. His famously short temper was even more frayed than normal – though his sense of humour and his ability to be politically incorrect remained as strong as ever. ‘I’m so stressed I’m having nightmares again,’ he said as the pressure mounted. ‘I woke up in a cold sweat at 6.30am this morning having a nightmare about Edwina in the nude. I was like, Fucking
hell, this is not a good image.’
While she was seeing even less of her husband than normal during the filming of the show, Tana was convinced he would last the pace. ‘Gordon likes the challenge of it all and he went into it with his eyes open. It is frustrating, it is tough and I feel for him, but this is what he thrives on.’
As it turned out, the same could not be said for all of the celebrities. Mutiny had been in the air ever since the training sessions had ended and the real work had begun. At 26, Dwain Chambers was one of the youngest on the show and as an ex-athlete he was one of the fittest. But even he found the physical and mental demands of keeping up with Gordon too much and so he quit after one row too many. ‘It’s too tough,’ he said afterwards. ‘It was an experience but it was not fun. It’s hot, it’s stressful, there’s a lot of verbal, you end up swearing yourself and I’m not a guy who likes to swear. We all got cuts and bruises, it was hard as hell and I’m just glad I’m out.’
Tommy Vance left the same day – refusing to attend the morning roll-call to tell Gordon that he was going. As a former worker in the Merchant Navy’s catering corps, 63-year-old Tommy had been expected to fare better than his less experienced colleagues. But he lasted just 36 hours on the show after finding the atmosphere too poisonous and the 100-degree heat in the kitchen too much to bear. Meanwhile, the increasingly tearful pair of Amanda Barrie and James Dreyfus threatened to follow their former colleagues amid talk of a mass walkout by all the celebrities.
More worryingly for Gordon – and for ITV – was the fact that some two million viewers had also given up on Hell’s Kitchen. The first show drew seven million viewers on the opening Sunday night, a figure which rose two nights later to an impressive 8.3 million, or one in three people watching TV. But by the middle of that first week the viewing figures had slumped by more than three million. ‘Gordon Ramsay has always claimed that he hates being called a celebrity chef. Well, he’s about to find out how it feels to be called a former celebrity chef,’ wrote one columnist as the vultures gathered around the show.
The television critics were particularly savage. ‘It’s like a restaurant version of I’m A Celebrity … Get Me Out Of Here! without the inconvenience and expense of having to ship everybody to Australia. It’s like Big Brother in a kitchen or Survivor without the sand. It’s that same, clapped-out formula all over again but this time to the background of pots and pans and with the ringmaster in a chef’s white jacket,’ wrote the Daily Mail’s Neil Lyndon, who said the show could be the final nail in the coffin for reality television in general. ‘It certainly looks as if our appetite might be sated for watching Gordon Ramsay berating his hapless victims with all the guttersnipe incoherence and foul-mouthed boorishness of David Beckham reviling a linesman. Once is more than enough for this experience. Every night is unendurable.’
What hurt Gordon even more was the fact that one of his original mentors also felt he had to speak out against the show and his part in it. ‘I don’t believe that food and cooking should be treated in this way,’ said Michel Roux, the grand old man of British cooking, who had been Gordon’s hero at Le Gavroche nearly two decades earlier. ‘I don’t blame Gordon, he is the flavour of the day and he is using his situation to feed a want. But it is a sad thing. Years ago, we couldn’t talk about food or sex in this country, now everyone is an expert and everyone wants to see a top chef and Gordon is the best we have. But food is being trivialised and treated like a joke.’
Jan Moir, the award-winning restaurant critic of the Daily Telegraph, was equally concerned about the message the show was sending out and she had her own theory about what was behind it all. ‘You have to ask what the point of it all is. Gordon is so much above his rivals, he is in a league of his own. What he has done with his restaurants is incredible, but I think Hell’s Kitchen is going to be a disaster. The show is going to America and I wonder if that is what it is all about. I just hope Gordon does not become an Anne Robinson figure.’
It turned out that some of Gordon’s bosses were equally concerned. ‘The new owners of Claridge’s are worried that Gordon being in a reality-television series and all his swearing is too downmarket for the brand. Claridge’s success is based on its upmarket image and although it is becoming more modern this TV series is going too far,’ the Daily Mail was told, while Martyn Nail, executive head chef at one of the hotel’s other restaurants, said Gordon’s new incarnation as the bad boy of television cooking made his employers ‘incredibly nervous’.
At one point, it seemed as if even Hollywood stars were ganging up on him. When Sharon Stone was staying at Claridge’s to promote her latest film, Catwoman, she saw a photo of the hotel’s head chef on the wall outside his restaurant. ‘Who is he?’ she asked her minder. ‘Oh, I see, he’s a reality-television star,’ she summed up after hearing a run-though of his recent achievements.
But even more worrying for Gordon was the fact that it wasn’t just the experts, his peers or film stars who were confused or disappointed with his show. The Sun’s letters pages are not always the place for the most considered of opinions. But few can really argue with those of reader Margaret Campbell, who wrote in during the first week of the show. ‘I can’t help but think Gordon Ramsay’s ITV series Hell’s Kitchen is a waste of money compared to the similar Jamie’s Kitchen on Channel 4,’ she wrote. ‘Loads of food is thrown away and wasted in Hell’s Kitchen and the celebrity contestants aren’t even interested in getting a kitchen job. Jamie Oliver’s series got unemployed youngsters off the streets and gave them the opportunity to train for a new career and start a new life, which seems far more worthwhile to me.’
Heading home in the early hours after yet another bad night in Brick Lane, Gordon couldn’t hide his fears. After so many years of hard-fought success, had he risked everything and utterly misjudged the public mood? As a boy, he had sworn he would never cry in front of his father. Now he knew he risked being humiliated in front of the whole country. Could this be the high-profile public failure that he had spent a lifetime trying to avoid?
FOURTEEN
GORDON VERSUS EDWINA
Singer and former Brookside babe Jennifer Ellison would ultimately become the winner of Hell’s Kitchen and be crowned Top Celebrity Chef. But the grand old ladies Edwina Currie and Amanda Barrie would prove to be the real celebrity stars of the show. And Abi Titmuss was to save it from a ratings disaster.
Abi’s unwitting role in the drama came after a series of bad nights in the restaurant and bad training sessions in the kitchens. Gordon was becoming increasingly fraught and frustrated – and he vented his anger on Abi, the former nurse who was turning herself into a media personality after dating the troubled television host John Leslie.
‘Every time I look around you’re fucking giggling. This is fucking serious. We are so fucking close to getting it spot on and you think this is a fucking joke.’ Written out here, the words don’t look too awful, at least by Gordon’s famously aggressive standards. But in reality they were simply the start of a 60-second-plus diatribe that was almost unprecedented in its ferocity. And they were delivered with the chef’s face just inches from that of his victim.
After trying to justify herself and apologise, Abi, not surprisingly, ended up temporarily leaving the set and collapsing in tears. It was a turning point for the show, with Gordon accused of extreme sexism and of crossing the line between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour. But it got people watching again.
As the second week approached, viewing figures suddenly picked up and on the crucial Sunday night when it went head to head with the first show of that year’s Big Brother it was more than one million ahead in the ratings. The following night Hell’s Kitchen had almost twice as many viewers as Nadia, Ahmed, Victor and their other new housemates. In one sense, professional disaster for Gordon looked as if it had been averted. But the on-set battles were only just beginning.
Strip-club boss Peter Stringfellow was one of the restaurant’s hopeful diners on the night Gordon
launched his verbal attack on Abi. And he had characteristically blunt advice for the wannabe glamour girl. ‘Go on, girl – hit him,’ he said after seeing the pair together. But while Abi held back, Amanda Barrie was to prove a whole lot less restrained.
Carry On Cleo’s Amanda, who had become one of ITV’s Bad Girls after her long stint in Coronation Street, says it all began after a particularly sleepless night in the celebrities’ accommodation block. Everyone had been up until 4am celebrating Jennifer’s 21st birthday; Matt had played guitar and the others had tried to sing, with varying degrees of success. They were then back in the kitchen with Gordon at 8am. ‘Gordon was about to tell me what disgusting bit of dead animal I was going to have to deal with that morning, but before he began I suddenly thought I was going to be sick and pass out. I asked to be excused and dashed off screen, where the nurse insisted on taking my blood pressure. Gordon followed me and, despite it being obvious that I felt absolutely wretched, proceeded to shout and scream at me and accuse me of spoiling everything and trying to get out of working. The reality was that I was desperate not to be sick on camera. I was furious with him. Luckily, my blood pressure was all right and after drinking some water I went back to work.’
No one’s blood pressure stayed low for long, however. ‘An hour or so later, I was asked to collect a heavy box of apples from the walk-in fridge freezer,’ Amanda continues. ‘I had been complaining for three days that the light didn’t work in there. It was very dark, the floor was a skating rink and very dangerous. I had asked if someone could do something about it. They hadn’t, so inevitably I slipped and fell. I didn’t hurt myself but again I went out and asked for a light to be fitted to stop someone else from breaking their neck. Outside, instead of listening to me, Gordon said he wanted to discuss speciality dishes.’