Maybe it’s a bit like football managers. You know Fergie can b0llock his players into line and drive them to succeed in addition. Wenger presumably has quite a different approach and yet almost the same level of success.

i reread anthony bourdain’s kitchen confiential abt a week ago and it has a whole section on extreme in-kitchen profanity as a bonding-thing (that if you can’t take it, it’s a sign* you can’t actually take the stress and pressure of life-as-a-cook in general, and shd just quit)

this slightly made me re-view how ramsay behaves — ie i am preapred to accept that this is a picture of “real kitchen behaviour”, but i still think he really obviously amps up the cusswords bcz it’s “what the punters want”, and you notice that almost no one gets their licks in back

*plainly the maths doesn’t add up here: you are unable to hack the stress of cooklife PLUS
aggressive macho badinage therefore you are unable to hack the stress of cooklife alone er no, it was the badinage that i couldn’t take, cooklife i enjoyed

but hazing=teamwork-under-pressure is a fair argument to make absent any sign of alternative versions arising, i guess

“you’re just too nice” is quite a common crit of the owners and/or head chefs — ie don’t want to hurt feelings so fail to provide direction

this is why he is good! i enjoy the other evening cooks shows too for the expertise minus obnoxiousness tho, with the exception of Lawson whose is just too much of a gushing ham. i think Rick Stein is getting camper also…

“there is high-level implicit material here that i don’t think you could have found to explore and discuss even ten years ago”

certainly seems that way and i guess Ramsay can take credit for this, via Joliver at least.

where eg heston turns up at a restaurant delia has been “saving” and applies HIS rules and mind!

chef think is very much trapped in the present — one of the things ramsey often rails against is “datedness” — viz when a potentially good kitchen is fighting for its place via the fads of 15 years back; his advice is a mixture of potentially conservative common sense (”use local produce” — yes it is cheaper but the macro-effect will be for eating out never to be a taste of otherwhere) and hard-to-parse current-faddism (today’s “trends” are invisble to him as trends) (or at least he doesn’t give the game away)

one of the things i actually rather like abt this series is that professional craftsmanship is treated as a THING NOT TO BE FVCKED WITH — this is an attitude very much counter to who-moved-my-cheese management-speak, where mid or low level expertise is considered a useless impediment, an OBSTACLE TO BE SWEPT AWAY

(obviously my “passion” (©g.ramsey) here is related to the way management has dealt with magazine i work at lo these past five years)

It’s interesting that the Charlie Brookers of their world instantly sneered at the Heston Blumenthal series on BBC2 which is astonishing stuff in the same way as they would retrocheerlead YAY SUPERTRAMP but cough ahem ahem pretentious at, say, Anthony Braxton (and HB’s colour schematics look EXTREMELY SIMILAR to AB’s music flow recipes as diagrams).

of course the owner lost — all his decor was binned, his beloved meaningless restaurant name etc — but there was a strange underlying battle about conformism vs individualism vs what a service-provider thinks he is meant to be doing

i know these progs are controllongly and probably misleadingly edited but even so there is high-level implicit material here that i don’t think you could have found to explore and discuss even ten years ago

ramsey drives me mental bcz he is such a wonky mix of bad show-offy material — [insert tired swears here] — and craftsmanlike knowing what he’s talking about

is a restaurant’s financial success objective proof the food and service are good? or of our fear of difference? or what is it?

obviously there’s a kpunkish hell-in-a-handbasket interpretation — i think i prefer my “seven ages of pop man” model, where the drive to move to the next stage of cultural grasp manifests as an unease with the idea of yrself in the previous stage; and the move to recognise the flaws AND the values of “7 ages” as an “ideological structure” necessaily entails becoming less defensive by yrself-and-yr-tastes-when 13

The big problem is in mission. BBC3 and BBC4 both have a clear mission. BBC1 (light ent FOR ALL) but BBC2’s remit seems muddied. BBC3’s yoof agenda is actively damaged by BBC1’s forays into those areas and a geographical bent which sweepingly equates 14-34 = thick northerners.

BBC3 needs sport, music, film shows - it needs its own version of The Word really.Original programming has tended to equal shock docs and too much half-baked comedy. But there are gems in there (Its Adam & Shelley was great, Drop Dead Gorgeous surprisingly moving). But what’s a nascent poorly funded channel to do?

Really? I don’t have the same reaction to BBC Four even though they have a lot of programmes I don’t want to watch too. I’m not sure if this is a good or bad thing but I think I’d actually prefer it if the two channels merged to become a 24 hour channel. I realise this may make no sense at all to the demographers (in their suits and ties) but I don’t think this segregation of audiences is at all satisfying.

My gripe is not what BBC Three do but just how they do it. Being a whipping boy is a consequence of insisting on trying to carve out their brand in the way they have I think, and their own judgements about what’s appropriate for which audiences at which times.

It’s the inability of one audience to comprehend the existence of another compounded with “BUT IT’S PUBLIC SERVICE WHICH MEANS ME”, and it is annoying.

I can also see that with what’s been going on at the beeb, with a LOT of people calling for this or that, but mostly beeb3, to be scrapped, that this sort of ‘hitting out’ is just what’s needed to put a stop to the chatter. and it doesn’t seem overstated, even if the reports of that particular panel portray it as such.