Welcome to the ancestral home of the Marchmonts - Simon and Minty are passionate about all things to do with food, particularly about how you, the viewer who is in desperate need of some high culture, are going to be making and, thought it could be sacrilege, consuming such creations as are brought lovingly to life on this show.
Forget Jamie Oliver, forget Nigella Lawson and Delia Smith, this is a cooking show that is at the very top of the food chain.
(And forget living without fennel - it's the new revolution in cooking, and a trademark of the Marchmonts' restaurant, The Quill And Tassel in Bray, England. Make sure you try the Bread AND Butter Pudding with shaved fennel while you're there.)
Simon and Minty are the to-the-manor-born hosts of the show. While Minty (Arabella Weir) gives us cooking tips (exasperate your vegetables until exhausted; disturb your chestnuts in milk until queasy, then disappoint), Simon (Richard E. Grant) teaches those of us with ordinary tastebuds the finer points of wine selection and consumption.
This show is well written (with Arabella Weir being involved in that writing) - its satire of the cooking shows which now saturate our screens is a welcome change from being told that all these years we've been boiling those eggs all wrong. Chris Langham's directing style can be seen by those familiar with series such as "People Like Us". It's mockumentary style makes the irony behind the dialogue between the show's hosts all that more enjoyable.
The two hosts turn in great performances: Minty is a fallen domestic goddess, somewhere between Nigella Lawson and Delia Smith, who's marriage to Simon seems to have come about because Minty wanted a title and Simon wanted to get marriage out of the way so he could continue his tennis lessons with his strapping spanish male tennis coach. Arabella Weir is delightful as Minty and Richard E. Grant turns in another quality performance of eccentric English aristocratic snobbery.
I've given the show a good rating so far but I'm sure there will be those who disagree. What I say is this: watch for yourself, and if you don't get at least a laugh out of one short and insane episode, check your pulse and go take some lessons in the British sense of irony.
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