Gordon Ramsay's latest series saw its first episode draw a smaller audience than The Hotel Inspector. Photograph: Stephane De Sakutin/AFP/Getty Images
The third episode of Gordon Ramsay's new series Gordon's Great Escape aired last night. You probably didn't watch it. Why would you? Just look at what it was up against. The new Adam Curtis documentary. Game of Thrones. The ITV series about Strangeways. A show about special ambulances for fat people. The episode of Glee where they singthat Rebecca Black song. Alongside televisual titans like these, no wonder people aren't tuning in.
This hasn't always been the case. Not so long ago, a Gordon Ramsay series would be all but guaranteed success. Hell's Kitchen made him a star. Kitchen Nightmares demonstrated his flair as a restaurateur. The stunts Ramsay pulled in The F Word made for constant headline fodder.
But Gordon's Great Escape has been met with almost blanket apathy. The first episode was watched live on Channel 4 by fewer than a million people – fewer than all its major competitors. Less than Channel 5's The Hotel Inspector, even. And that's rubbish. So what's gone wrong? And does this spell the end of Gordon Ramsay's television career in this country?
It's not that Gordon's Great Escape is a bad show. It's just a bit ill-defined. It's a celebrity travelogue in an age that's already saturated with celebrity travelogues. It's Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations without the insight, or Jamie Does … without the recipes. Ostensibly it's about Gordon Ramsay travelling to south-east Asia to learn a new style of cooking. In reality, on the basis of last night's show, it's about him waggling animal penises about and aggressively shouting the word "clitoris" at old ladies a lot. Which is OK if you like that kind of thing. But it's no Friday performed by the entire cast of Glee, is it?
Perhaps people aren't watching because they're bored of Gordon Ramsay himself. That he spreads himself too thinly is an oft-cited criticism of his restaurant empire, but it applies just as much to his television output. And the lack of focus is beginning to show. His last major British series, Ramsay's Best Restaurant, was a tedious mishmash of several other shows, and his contribution to this year's Big Fish Fight season was both ridiculous and – once it had emerged that he'd previously been fishing for the very sharks he claimed to want to save – sort of pointless. Throw in Ramsay's well-publicised personal and professional problems and the fact that on screen he's now little more than a clump of irritating personality tics – the swearing, the hand slap, the "Ugh? Yes?" – and viewers have every reason to feel fatigued.
A few months ago there was some debate about whether or not Channel 4 should renew Ramsay's contract when it expires this year, and the ratings for Gordon's Great Escape won't do anything to hush the naysayers. Not that Gordon Ramsay should be too panicked by this, of course – in the US he's still the host of Hell's Kitchen, MasterChef and Kitchen Nightmares, jobs that pay him an estimated £9.4m per year. Most of these shows will end up being syndicated here, but it's hardly the same. There was a time when Gordon Ramsay was one of the faces of Channel 4. Now he's being overtaken by a Channel 5 programme about a woman who sneers at bedspreads for a living. It's a spectacular fall from grace.
But maybe there's still hope for him. The best parts of Gordon's Great Escape are the brief clips of Ramsay cooking his own recipes. In them he's enthusiastic and engaging and gets to put his encyclopaedic knowledge of food to good use. He's one of this country's best chefs. Might more people be interested iif he was given a show where he stopped dicking around and just cooked things
?
?
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