Audrey’s Kitchen: a cooking show with a side of satire
July 10th, 2012
I’m not going to lie to you – I love cooking shows. There’s little in this world I love more than sitting on the couch in my trackie daks and scoffing at the silly contestants of MasterChef who don’t even know their crème fraîche from their crème anglaise. Fools!
However I’m well aware of the fact our television screens seem to be getting increasingly saturated in the genre – much like a piece of maple-drizzled brioche bread in a pan full of sizzling butter…
mmm, butter…
Ahem. Not only is there an alarming amount of ‘food porn’ on the telly at the moment, but they all have a tendency to take themselves extraordinarily seriously. Think MasterChef contestants bursting into tears every 45 seconds over their ‘food dreams’ going up in smoke, or Jamie Oliver sanctimoniously admonishing the residents of Huntington, West Virginia (America’s fattest city) about their eating habits.
Certainly, being better educated about the food we put in our bodies is a good thing. But must it come at the expense of our sense of humour?
Enter Audrey Gordon: a fictional character who stars in the ABC’s new show, Audrey’s Kitchen.
Described as “Britain’s sternest cook”, Audrey will be popping up for a series of three minute shows on Saturday nights to inject a bit of acidity into a genre which is all too often sickly sweet.
Created by Working Dog Productions, Audrey’s Kitchen stars Heidi Arena as one of Australia’s “best-known food writers”.
Says Tom Gleisner:
”For us, the comedy is not that the recipes are amusing; it’s more the attitude of people who earnestly espouse the need to eat organic, free-range local produce and make you feel guilty if you don’t.”
You can catch Audrey’s Kitchen on ABC1, on Saturdays and Sundays at 6.25pm.
And in the meantime, you might want to check out the BBC’s 2003 equivalent Posh Nosh, starring the hilarious Richard E. Grant. The most awesome cooking show ever made!
Major props for dropping a bit more Richard E Grant into our lives.