MasterChef

MasterChef is the most tolerable reality TV show in Australia! But that doesn’t mean that you have the strength of will to stay up-to-date with each of the 700 episodes which air annually.

If you like the feeling of being familiar with the zeitgeist without the hassle of having to actually engage with it, you’ll need a shortcut.

Here’s what I predict happens in tonight’s MasterChef finale:

  • The two exhausted contestants tell the producers that they are both extremely excited and cripplingly anxious about the final challenge (they’re hot and they’re cold, they’re yes then they’re no).
  • Matt Preston arrives in a suit whose previous owner was either a duke in the court of King Louis XVI of France or an actor in Sofia Coppola’s interpretation of a duke in the court of King Louis XVI of France.

Matt Preston

  • George’s eyes dart nervously towards the door. You know why.
  • Guest judge, Heston Blumenthal, spends 45 minutes lying on the floor of the pantry in pitch darkness and total silence so he can conjure his “muse”. His muse tells him that the contestants should cook potato gems that have the taste of a lemon milkshake and the texture of being asked to your Year 12 formal.
  • Cooking!!!
  • Every five minutes or so, Gary whoops and swings his arm in the air while saying nonsensical things like, “Bim bang boom, shake the room, only 10 minutes left to cook a loon!” but keeps his other fist clenched just in case anyone thinks that he’s not taking cooking seriously.
  • Someone waves a rubber chicken in the air.
  • The contestants begin to make fantastic progress on their pretentious and impossible Heston dishes. That’s not good TV! “BRING IN THE GRANDPAS!” yells Gary. A skylight opens up and the final two contestants’ grandpas are airlifted into the kitchen. The contestants put down their spatulas and begin to cry. Grandpas just keep coming; hundreds of grandpas in pea-green knits and spectacles and newsboys hats keep zooming from the skylight. Who do these grandpas belong to? Everyone cries.

  • Now that the first task is done, Heston suggests that the only way to determine who is the best cook in Australia (the “Master” “Chef”) is to take a piece of dying coral from the Great Barrier Reef, coat it in manuka honey and somehow make it taste like electricity. The dish also must work as a functioning analogue clock.  
  • As the contestants frantically chop chilies — wincing as it burns their already perforated hands — Gary whispers, “That looks spicy…” then looks directly into the camera. “… Spicy like the new season of The Bachelor, August 16, only on Ten”.  
  • You, the viewer, turn to someone in your house and say, “You should be on MasterChef!” You both smile.
  • Confetti with an unclear origin.