Goodbye Delia, hello Arabella

Does the hilarious new spoof, Posh Nosh, mark the demise of the panic-inducing celebrity stirrer?

Since my earliest days with the Galloping Gourmet, I have befriended Keith Floyd, Rick Stein and Madhur Jaffrey. I have flirted with Gary Rhodes and his irritating habit of 'spooning the actual quince over the actual almond cake, allowing just a little of the actual syrup to seep into the actual sponge'. (Get this: I counted 47 actuals in one half-hour episode - until ultimately I fell off the sofa in a spasm of sheer boredom.)

I've spent a good few hours with Delia and her doughy hands, those pastry fingers pointing out the advantages of 'my professional-quality 9-cm copper butter warmer here'. This woman is a deeply possessive cook, forever telling us about putting 'MY batter into MY omelette pan where I will swizzle it about a bit with MY fork'. Now that she has hung up her TV oven gauntlets for good, I imagine Delia pirouetting around her kitchen, stroking her egg coddler, her corn popper and her full set of terracotta gratin dishes in a state of proprietorial bliss.

And, though I spend a fair amount of time in his company, I nurse a particular peeve against Antony Worrall Thompson. I'm sure he is a terrific fellow in real life, but the cameras make him look like the bastard child of Robin Cook and a Terry's Chocolate Orange. During his more corpulent phase, Wozza's mouth had me reaching for the Pepto Bismol; in the excitement of producing a toad-in-the-hole, his birdbath lips would threaten to overspill, basting his recipes with his own spittle. And don't even start me off on that vast cook who used to appear on Food and Drink - the one who bathed his dishes in a stew of saliva, sweat and heavy breathing so abhorrent that he ought to have been shut down by environmental health.

While I'm at it, Nigella's cakes must be thick, thick with hair (I keep barking 'tie it up!' at the screen. I'm sure my neighbours think I'm into kink). Now we've got Giorgio Locatelli's hair to contend with. And that's on top of Jamie's tongue and Ainsley's hips.

All in all they make a pretty irritating bunch. No wonder we're beginning to tire of them. No wonder Delia is reciped out. No wonder viewing figures for Nigella's Forever Summer series were lower than expected. And now, Arabella Weir and Richard E. Grant have come along to take the mick.

Their new comedy series, Posh Nosh, does a brilliant job of undermining the nation's wobbling soufflé of interest in TV food programmes. There they are discussing their annual 'currant run' to Greece, or the close-shaved fennel with which they top their bread-and-butter pudding. 'We only pick the happy hens,' says Grant's character Simon, 'they don't have those awful Cliff Richard necks.' And all the while, Weir's Minty Marchmont is 'disappointing' vegetables, 'custardising' puddings and 'cautioning' egg yolks. 'You can use stock cubes for this,' she says of their renowned paella, '...if you have no self-esteem.'

Posh Nosh captures the rotten heart of our TV food fetish: that this heaving feast of telly merely makes us feel inadequate. There's no way we mortals could deglaze a pan like Raymond Blanc. There's no hope that we could prepare a delicious and nourishing meal using only string beans, a tin of mandarins and a herring, like they do on Ready Steady Cook.

Life's just not like that. No one I know has streams of sunshine constantly flooding their kitchen through leaded windows, alighting on creamware jugs filled with marjoram and chervil. In my experience, real kitchens come complete with gack on the floor of the oven and curd in the crevices of the hob. Real cooks are always fresh out of lemons. Real spice jars have lids that fall off into the coq au vin. Real husbands have been known to fry bacon and eggs in lime cordial rather than oil (well, mine did. The bottles are identical, apparently). The TV versions are merely a window on perfection, a Utopian ideal where someone else chops your onions, someone else does the washing up, and you never find a furry jacket of mould on the crème fraîche or a crust of old egg on the slotted spoon.

And though we Brits have consumed the TV chefs for years, I honestly don't know a soul who makes these TV dinners. Why bother? What we're really after is the lifestyle - Jamie's zippy scooter; Nigella's toffee-coloured domestic heaven; a world in which all meat hails from an organic farm in Gloucestershire. In reality, of course, most of our meat lives in a polystyrene tray, vacuum-packed in a two-for-one offer from Tesco.

Perhaps the end of our affair with TV chefs will mean we actually get off our rumps to make a bit more effort in the kitchen. I could certainly do something simple with pasta quills and a can of plum tomatoes. I might even manage a bread-and-butter pud (no fennel). After years of telly training, it should be a doddle.

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