Gordon Ramsay (21 page)

He would start at Claridge's at 7am most mornings, spend the day shuttling between it, his other kitchens and
Hell's Kitchen
and end up back at Claridge's around 1.45am to catch up on the day. On the short break between the initial training of the celebrities in west London and the move to the East End, he fitted in a trip to New Zealand to work on an international scholarship he had set up for young chefs three years earlier, and his publishers wanted him to do a jet-lag-inducing one-day book-signing trip to New York to promote
Kitchen Heaven
as well. His famously short temper was even more frayed than normal – though
his sense of humour and his ability to be politically incorrect remained as strong as ever. ‘I'm so stressed I'm having nightmares again,' he said as the pressure mounted. ‘I woke up in a cold sweat at 6.30am this morning having a nightmare about Edwina in the nude. I was like, Fucking hell, this is not a good image.'

While she was seeing even less of her husband than normal during the filming of the show, Tana was convinced he would last the pace. ‘Gordon likes the challenge of it all and he went into it with his eyes open. It is frustrating, it is tough and I feel for him, but this is what he thrives on.'

As it turned out, the same could not be said for all of the celebrities. Mutiny had been in the air ever since the training sessions had ended and the real work had begun. At 26, Dwain Chambers was one of the youngest on the show and as an ex-athlete he was one of the fittest. But even he found the physical and mental demands of keeping up with Gordon too much and so he quit after one row too many. ‘It's too tough,' he said afterwards. ‘It was an experience but it was not fun. It's hot, it's stressful, there's a lot of verbal, you end up swearing yourself and I'm not a guy who likes to swear. We all got cuts and bruises, it was hard as hell and I'm just glad I'm out.'

Tommy Vance left the same day – refusing to attend the morning roll-call to tell Gordon that he was going. As a former worker in the Merchant Navy's catering corps, 63-year-old Tommy had been expected to fare better than his less experienced colleagues. But he lasted just 36 hours on the show after finding the atmosphere too poisonous and the 100-degree heat in the kitchen
too much to bear. Meanwhile, the increasingly tearful pair of Amanda Barrie and James Dreyfus threatened to follow their former colleagues amid talk of a mass walkout by all the celebrities.

More worryingly for Gordon – and for ITV – was the fact that some two million viewers had also given up on
Hell's Kitchen
. The first show drew seven million viewers on the opening Sunday night, a figure which rose two nights later to an impressive 8.3 million, or one in three people watching TV. But by the middle of that first week the viewing figures had slumped by more than three million. ‘Gordon Ramsay has always claimed that he hates being called a celebrity chef. Well, he's about to find out how it feels to be called a former celebrity chef,' wrote one columnist as the vultures gathered around the show.

The television critics were particularly savage. ‘It's like a restaurant version of
I'm A Celebrity … Get Me Out Of Here!
without the inconvenience and expense of having to ship everybody to Australia. It's like
Big Brother
in a kitchen or
Survivor
without the sand. It's that same, clapped-out formula all over again but this time to the background of pots and pans and with the ringmaster in a chef's white jacket,' wrote the
Daily Mail
's Neil Lyndon, who said the show could be the final nail in the coffin for reality television in general. ‘It certainly looks as if our appetite might be sated for watching Gordon Ramsay berating his hapless victims with all the guttersnipe incoherence and foul-mouthed boorishness of David Beckham reviling a linesman. Once is more than enough for this experience. Every night is unendurable.'

What hurt Gordon even more was the fact that one of
his original mentors also felt he had to speak out against the show and his part in it. ‘I don't believe that food and cooking should be treated in this way,' said Michel Roux, the grand old man of British cooking, who had been Gordon's hero at Le Gavroche nearly two decades earlier. ‘I don't blame Gordon, he is the flavour of the day and he is using his situation to feed a want. But it is a sad thing. Years ago, we couldn't talk about food or sex in this country, now everyone is an expert and everyone wants to see a top chef and Gordon is the best we have. But food is being trivialised and treated like a joke.'

Jan Moir, the award-winning restaurant critic of the
Daily Telegraph
, was equally concerned about the message the show was sending out and she had her own theory about what was behind it all. ‘You have to ask what the point of it all is. Gordon is so much above his rivals, he is in a league of his own. What he has done with his restaurants is incredible, but I think
Hell's Kitchen
is going to be a disaster. The show is going to America and I wonder if that is what it is all about. I just hope Gordon does not become an Anne Robinson figure.'

It turned out that some of Gordon's bosses were equally concerned. ‘The new owners of Claridge's are worried that Gordon being in a reality-television series and all his swearing is too downmarket for the brand. Claridge's success is based on its upmarket image and although it is becoming more modern this TV series is going too far,' the
Daily Mail
was told, while Martyn Nail, executive head chef at one of the hotel's other restaurants, said Gordon's new incarnation as the bad boy of television cooking made his employers ‘incredibly nervous'.

At one point, it seemed as if even Hollywood stars were ganging up on him. When Sharon Stone was staying at Claridge's to promote her latest film,
Catwoman
, she saw a photo of the hotel's head chef on the wall outside his restaurant. ‘Who is he?' she asked her minder. ‘Oh, I see, he's a reality-television star,' she summed up after hearing a run-though of his recent achievements.

But even more worrying for Gordon was the fact that it wasn't just the experts, his peers or film stars who were confused or disappointed with his show. The
Sun
's letters pages are not always the place for the most considered of opinions. But few can really argue with those of reader Margaret Campbell, who wrote in during the first week of the show. ‘I can't help but think Gordon Ramsay's ITV series
Hell's Kitchen
is a waste of money compared to the similar
Jamie's Kitchen
on Channel 4,' she wrote. ‘Loads of food is thrown away and wasted in
Hell's Kitchen
and the celebrity contestants aren't even interested in getting a kitchen job. Jamie Oliver's series got unemployed youngsters off the streets and gave them the opportunity to train for a new career and start a new life, which seems far more worthwhile to me.'

Heading home in the early hours after yet another bad night in Brick Lane, Gordon couldn't hide his fears. After so many years of hard-fought success, had he risked everything and utterly misjudged the public mood? As a boy, he had sworn he would never cry in front of his father. Now he knew he risked being humiliated in front of the whole country. Could this be the high-profile public failure that he had spent a lifetime trying to avoid?

FOURTEEN

S
inger and former
Brookside
babe Jennifer Ellison would ultimately become the winner of
Hell’s Kitchen
and be crowned Top Celebrity Chef. But the grand old ladies Edwina Currie and Amanda Barrie would prove to be the real celebrity stars of the show. And Abi Titmuss was to save it from a ratings disaster.

Abi’s unwitting role in the drama came after a series of bad nights in the restaurant and bad training sessions in the kitchens. Gordon was becoming increasingly fraught and frustrated – and he vented his anger on Abi, the former nurse who was turning herself into a media personality after dating the troubled television host John Leslie.

‘Every time I look around you’re fucking giggling. This is fucking serious. We are so fucking close to getting it spot on and you think this is a fucking joke.’ Written out here, the words don’t look too awful, at least by Gordon’s
famously aggressive standards. But in reality they were simply the start of a 60-second-plus diatribe that was almost unprecedented in its ferocity. And they were delivered with the chef’s face just inches from that of his victim.

After trying to justify herself and apologise, Abi, not surprisingly, ended up temporarily leaving the set and collapsing in tears. It was a turning point for the show, with Gordon accused of extreme sexism and of crossing the line between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour. But it got people watching again.

As the second week approached, viewing figures suddenly picked up and on the crucial Sunday night when it went head to head with the first show of that year’s
Big Brother
it was more than one million ahead in the ratings. The following night
Hell’s Kitchen
had almost twice as many viewers as Nadia, Ahmed, Victor and their other new housemates. In one sense, professional disaster for Gordon looked as if it had been averted. But the on-set battles were only just beginning.

Strip-club boss Peter Stringfellow was one of the restaurant’s hopeful diners on the night Gordon launched his verbal attack on Abi. And he had characteristically blunt advice for the wannabe glamour girl. ‘Go on, girl – hit him,’ he said after seeing the pair together. But while Abi held back, Amanda Barrie was to prove a whole lot less restrained.

Carry On Cleo
’s Amanda, who had become one of ITV’s
Bad Girls
after her long stint in
Coronation Street
, says it all began after a particularly sleepless night in the celebrities’ accommodation block. Everyone had been up until 4am celebrating Jennifer’s 21st birthday; Matt had played guitar
and the others had tried to sing, with varying degrees of success. They were then back in the kitchen with Gordon at 8am. ‘Gordon was about to tell me what disgusting bit of dead animal I was going to have to deal with that morning, but before he began I suddenly thought I was going to be sick and pass out. I asked to be excused and dashed off screen, where the nurse insisted on taking my blood pressure. Gordon followed me and, despite it being obvious that I felt absolutely wretched, proceeded to shout and scream at me and accuse me of spoiling everything and trying to get out of working. The reality was that I was desperate not to be sick on camera. I was furious with him. Luckily, my blood pressure was all right and after drinking some water I went back to work.’

No one’s blood pressure stayed low for long, however. ‘An hour or so later, I was asked to collect a heavy box of apples from the walk-in fridge freezer,’ Amanda continues. ‘I had been complaining for three days that the light didn’t work in there. It was very dark, the floor was a skating rink and very dangerous. I had asked if someone could do something about it. They hadn’t, so inevitably I slipped and fell. I didn’t hurt myself but again I went out and asked for a light to be fitted to stop someone else from breaking their neck. Outside, instead of listening to me, Gordon said he wanted to discuss speciality dishes.’

Which was when it all kicked off. ‘I just saw red and took a swipe at him. He grabbed my arms very firmly and shouted, “Don’t raise your hand at me.” He was pretty strong – all that chopping has given him powerful arm muscles – but all I thought was, I missed you the first time, you silly little man, but I won’t again. In all, I am told I tried to whack
him five times. He started to grapple with me, then shouted for security, who turned up and prised us apart.’

It was at this point that Amanda says she lost respect for the chef. ‘What kind of 37-year-old man calls for outside help to deal with a 68-year-old woman? Am I so intimidating and strong? Where is his dignity?’ she asked afterwards, appalled.

The next morning after roll-call, Amanda decided that she too should follow Dwain and Tommy and quit the show. ‘When I took a swipe at you yesterday, quite honestly I thought, I’m totally out of control here and I am obviously not in control of myself when I am around you. I am either in tears or taking a whack at you and that is no way to behave,’ she told the exhausted-looking Gordon as she resigned from her post. ‘It has been quite an experience but I think I would like to go home now and watch the rest of the show in bed with a bottle of Champagne and some fish and chips.’

Gordon took the news calmly. ‘Amanda, I admire your honesty and thank you,’ he said. ‘And can I just say it was a bloody good shot.’

Losing Amanda did not lower the tensions, however, because
Hell’s Kitchen
had just entered a new phase. Contestants were now being voted off the show in a nightly public vote, with a tearful Belinda Carlisle first to go. ‘I am happy to go home and see my family but in other ways I am sad to leave,’ the singer told Angus Deayton in a post-eviction interview. ‘I love to cook but not to that level,’ she said. And as she left the set she gave Gordon a rare compliment. ‘He is great and it is never personal,’ she concluded when asked about his rantings.

Firmly back in the real world, Belinda’s for mer confidante and red-team mate Amanda was less flattering about their former teacher and the whole structure of the show. ‘Anyone – myself included – who is silly enough to go into one of these reality shows deserves everything they get. And anyone who goes into the kitchen with Gordon Ramsay should know exactly what they are letting themselves in for,’ she began. ‘I half-admire him as a showman and recognise that he can be charismatic but he is also a typical bully and when he becomes deliberately, personally cruel it is offensive and deeply unfunny. He has developed a technique of alternately praising you, then knocking you down so you don’t know where you are. In the end you are so pleased not to be browbeaten that you become totally placid.’

Others were also lining up to call the former footballer the biggest drama queen on television. Dr Patrick Tissington of Aston Business School has spent much of his career analysing how people function in the high-pressure worlds of the Armed Forces, the Royal Marines and the emergency services. And he wasn’t convinced Gordon was coping. ‘Too much time and emotional effort is expended on confrontation rather than in getting the job done,’ he said. ‘Ramsay would be dismissed as “a flapper” by fire officers or others who have to make life-and-death decisions under pressure.’