Revisiting, briefly, My Kitchen Rules

Back in the last decade, I used to post every now and then about the current season of My Kitchen Rules, before getting thoroughly sick of the formula and the clear decision of the producers to make it increasingly about contestant bitchiness and conflict than cooking.   And then the show got rested anyway, due to the shame felt by having given tanned nutjob Pete Evans a TV profile for a decade, presumably.

But I see that it's back, and I have to admit, I have dipped my toe into it again.   

Not much though - it was obvious from the first episode that the old, shameful formula is still there.

So I'm not going to bother with talking about it much, but I did want to note two of the "too obvious" drama tactics the show uses:

1.   This season features, once again, an apparently upper middle class couple who might dress well and live in a nice house (perhaps with a flash boat tied up to their canal jetty), but their taste in food is relatively unsophisticated and verges on bogan-ish.  (This year's couple, for example, made a jaw dropping claim - for contestants on a cooking show - that the duck they were being served was the first time they had ever eaten it.  This did make me laugh, actually, as I tried to imagine the number of other viewers around Australia gasping at their lack of culinary adventure.)

But what's worse (for me, as resident and defender of this fair city) is that these couples are from Brisbane, or further north in Queensland.   I am pretty sure, if I were an obsessive with time on my hands, that I could show that this is at least the third time that such a couple have - suspiciously - been Queenslanders.  I have little doubt that the producers are from the southern "foodie" cities, and actively look for contestant applicants from up North who seem to think they know about food, but really don't: all the better for the rest of the country to laugh at.   (Seriously, I would love to be a fly on the wall during production meetings, to hear drama tactics discussed.)

2.   I have mentioned this before, but it seems they just can't give it a rest:   the ridiculousness of the way at least half of the teams, on their first home restaurant night, cook something they've cooked a hundred times before as their speciality, only to stuff it up completely.   "Oh, I don't know what's gone wrong.  It just didn't set/freeze/cook like it usually does."

The fact that they are cooking for a larger number of people is no excuse.   If you have normally cooked for 6, and have to do it for double that number, you can still do a dry run for cooking for 12, surely??

It becomes particularly hard to believe when it's a case of the team who liked to talk up their abilities, and are too harsh on the others' efforts, only to get their comeuppance when they try to cook their No 1 dish.   My eyes can't roll back far enough for the number of times we have seen this scenario.

On a side note, re-reading my old posts on past seasons, reminded me that I used to enjoy the episode reviews of comedian/writer Ben Pobjie.  I haven't thought about him for some years:  in 2017, I noted  that he seemed to be trying to break into stand up comedy with little (or limited) success, and had also made it clear he has some serious mental health issues.  

So, I just looked on Twitter to see if he is still active there.  He is, although it seems with not much of a following.  And he's still a bit of a worry - his current post includes a bit of mocking of RU OK day, which seems a bit odd, given his past (current?) problems.      

Anyway, it's not like I don't wish him well - I thought his writing on MKR could be very amusing indeed.  Hope he finds another niche, eventually.