Catch up TV...

Missed the TV moment everyone’s talking about? Nick Curtis looks at the shows you should have watched (and still can) and the upcoming must-sees
10 January 2014

In a car crash, time slows down, and you notice all sorts of odd details. It seems now that the British public and Nigella Lawson have been involved in a silently screaming, endlessly telescoping, no-brakes accident since the middle of last year, and the point of impact finally came with the first episode of The Taste (4oD).

First there was the court case of her former assistants, over which we drooled with mixed sympathy and schadenfreude. Not so much at the so-what revelations of drug use as at the far more intriguing portrait of the romantic dysfunction and financial lackadaisicality of the Saatchi-Lawson household. Then came the Tourette-ish publicity campaign. “High stakes cooking” screamed Channel 4’s website (snigger). “Nigella: Meet the new men in my life” yowled the Radio Times (fnarr). Meanwhile, Nigella twisted and gurned in the TV ads, sticking things in her mouth and pantomiming agony and ecstasy in what felt like a metaphor for her public persona.

And then the show itself. Dear God it’s awful. The idea is that Lawson and her fellow judges — comedy French chef Ludo Lefebvre and shouty gonzo foodie Anthony Bourdain — select, mentor and then periodically expel competing home cooks and professional chefs after blind-tasting single spoonfuls of their food. Did no one notice that “blind tasting” is the least visually evocative concept ever? That the studio set looks like a funeral home? That the format is just bits of The Voice, The Face and Bake Off stuck together with semolina? That the confected antagonism of the judges doesn’t work if they all claim to be the underdog?

Eight of my immediate colleagues watched The Taste and none of us can remember what the prize is, though the first winner of the American version got $100,000 and a Ford hybrid. Pfft! You can get that working for a week as Nigella’s assistant.

From car crash to train-wreck.

The 7.39 (iPlayer) saw author David Nicholls cannibalise the concept of his inexplicably popular novel One Day (boy and girl meet on same day every year) into a queasy suburban romance: boy and girl start an affair after meeting on the same commuter train every day. Maybe Nicholls’s autobiography will be called One Idea. The varied and various talents of David Morrissey, Sheridan Smith and, er, Sean Maguire were wasted here, although Olivia Colman came out of it with dignity as the incandescently wounded wife. Smith will get a rematch though: since she and Colman are in everything, it’s a statistical inevitability.

Stay in for...

The Voice, tomorrow, 7pm, BBC1

The sainted Kylie Minogue will be “spinning around” in the talent show’s revolving chairs, along with fellow new judge/mentor Ricky “Kaiser Chiefs” Wilson (but who cares about him, eh?). In this series they’ve allegedly dropped the air of snooty superiority and gone all out for entertainment.

Hostages, tomorrow, 9pm, C4

In a bid for the Homeland audienceC4 has nabbed this CBS drama: surgeon Toni Collette is due to operate on the US president when, horrors, FBI agent Dylan McDermott kidnaps her family and tries to blackmail her into killing him.

And get ready for...

The Ark, BBC1, Feb

The BBC’s commemoration of the centenary of the First World War steps up a gear with this drama set in a field hospital. Oona Chaplin, Kerry Fox, Hermione Norris and Alice St Clair are among those in starched caps and aprons.

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