THE RESTAURANT

Another elimination type show with each team of two trying to run a restaurant. We have top chef Raymond Blanc and his comedy french accent in the Siralan role and a restaunteur pal and an icy young businesswoman as his Nick and Margaret.

There are lots of shots of Raymond's lovely looking restaurant near Oxford and then the nine are told that they each have to cook a course each of a three course meal and the worst one will be eliminated before they even get to their restaurant. It's too early to remember much about the contestants but the most memorable moments of epsiode one were...

1) There is a welsh lady with a husband of chinese origin (who said about three words all episode). Their concept was welsh/chinese fusion. LOL. This basically consists of him cooking yummy looking chinese food and then chucking a few leeks into it.

2) There was a very twee young lady with a gaydar triggering husband, who puts flowers in all his dishes. He seems like a pretty decent chef but she is v annoying, and you just know that they must have twee nicknames for each others genitals.

3) There was a father/daughter team - you get the idea that the daughter basically threatened to hold her breath until daddy procurred a restaurant for her. Again, she is a pretty good cook, but they made the mistake of telling Ray that they were serving spring lamb and he was all 'Please, that bitch was at least 11 weeks old when it was slaughtered.' Do not try to con Raymond re the age of your carcass as he will totaly pwn you over it.

4) Someone else was chastised re the quality of their watercress

T5) here is a young married couple who are obsessed with Englishness and want to do proper English food. They want to call their restaurant Ray White’s – geddit??? The bloke reminds me a bit of Mickey from League of Gentlemen. For their dessert, they make that classic English dish: rhubarb and ginger cheesecake with goats’ cheese. Vom. Apparently the goats’ cheese is so mild that it doesn’t spoil the dessert, but it looks like something that has been decanted hastily from a tin and they get told off re the presentation.

6) A couple of gay air stewards with a concept for a restaurant that sounded like something from a Victoria Wood sketch - Seasons and Sorbets - where they serve seasonal food, with a lot of sorbets I assume. For their starter they coked a pea and mint soup and served it in a hollowed out bap. Why? Why??? Also they used frozen peas because peas aren't actually in season. Doh. They just scraped through

7) Another couple of blokes, who we are told are just friends but again set the old gaydar blaring. The guy doing the cooking was an intense muscley bloke with lots of tattoos, who is a professional chef, and his ahem friend is a mild mannered cuddly type with glasses who gets bossed around a lot. Muscle boy cooked an insanely ambitious dish that included a saffron potato puree. As he was cooking it, the voice over explained that sometimes the dish can separate out and the butter and starch can react in a weird way. Hmm, I wonder why they would tell us that? Oh right. Muscle boy is soon sweating profusely as he tries to rescue his pretentious mash and ends up dishing up what looks like mustard coloured play-doh. Raymond takes him to pieces over it and says it's no good trying to do 'fine dining' if you can't handle the cooking (At this point I would have said 'Can we change our concept to mediocre dining instead?'.) Again, they just scrape through and muscle boy ends up weeping in his pal's arms. Awww. They were so hilarious that I would carry on watching just for them and think they ought to get their own sitcom

8) A mother and daughter want to open a carribean restaurant. For her dish, the mum chucks some tinned mango puree into a bowl, stirs some cream and lime juice into it and pops it into the freezer. Yes, this is the best dish she knows that she thinks will impress Raymond Blanc the mostest!! Why didn't she just give him a plate of tescos rich tea or something? Unsurprisingly she doesn't get through to the next level.