Gordon Ramsay by Neil Simpson

Author:Neil Simpson
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978 1 84358 609 8
Publisher: John Blake
Published: 2011-04-09T16:00:00+00:00

TWELVE

NIGHTMARES AND ACCUSATIONS

The rancid scallops, unconventional omelettes and bad attitudes of Bonaparte’s weren’t the only horrors Gordon stumbled upon when he went out to film that first series of Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. And, fortunately for viewers, he was ready to tackle all the other disasters he saw in his usual brutal and uncompromising style. Critics said the next three shows in the series were ‘difficult to watch, but impossible to turn off’ because of Gordon’s kill-or-cure, cook-eat-cook approach – and nearly five million viewers a week agreed. At the end of the series, the programme was credited with triggering ITV’s ‘Black Tuesday’ – one of the worst ratings slumps in the channel’s history as more than one viewer in five chose to watch Gordon over any other terrestrial or satellite programme.

In the process, 37-year-old Gordon found himself turning into an unlikely heart-throb. He had been horrified a couple of years earlier when a reporter wrote that he looked a decade older than he was and that he had the kind of face ‘that you once saw long ago on young First World War soldiers returning old from the trenches’. So he kept having the blond streaks put in his hair, he kept doing his afternoon workouts at the near-empty gyms in his London hotels – and he kept showing off the results. His television directors loved the fact that he seemed willing to take his shirt off in front of the cameras and change clothes far more often than seemed strictly necessary for the job in hand. And, of course, they loved the fact that he continued to speak his mind about everything they put in front of him.

‘Gordon needs to be handled with all the care of a truckload of nitro-glycerine,’ a spokeswoman for Channel 4 admitted when asked about his temperament. Unfortunately for them, however, she didn’t seem to have passed that warning on to Neil Farrell and Richard Collins at the Glass House restaurant in Ambleside, Cumbria. In 2004, this was to be the second restaurant featured in Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. And it would end up making almost as many headlines as the first.

In his defence, many of the problems at the Glass House were not of owner Neil’s making. For example, the restaurant had opened just days before the foot-and-mouth crisis temporarily made much of the Lake District off limits. So his anticipated tourist trade wasn’t able to get to his restaurant and the locals had a lot more on their minds than trying out his unique garlic popcorn. With a frightening VAT bill outstanding and too many empty tables in the evenings, Neil was at crisis point. So he reckoned he had nothing to lose by calling in the cameras. ‘I felt I had already been to hell and back, so why not invite Mr Hell himself?’ he said of Gordon.

And Mr Ramsay turned into Mr Hell within hours of arriving at the restaurant for the ten-day assessment and advice period. Having ordered two deep-fried

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