Television - Gordon Ramsay whips some rotten restaurants into shape by Andrew Billen Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares (C4)

A viable alternative title for Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares (Tuesdays, 9pm) would be "Chefs Behaving Badly". You would certainly be pushed to claim that Gordon Ramsay - the Michelin-starred chef who, in this inspired series, troubleshoots failing restaurants - behaves well. In the hugely entertaining first episode, he tutors the head chef of Bonapartes, a dire West Yorkshire eatery, in the art of whipping a bowl of cream into meringue-like stiffness. He then holds the bowl over the chef's head. "You know what I'd like to do?" he says, and then does exactly that: plonks bowl and contents over the unfortunate's head. I've not seen such perfectly timed slapstick since Leslie Crowther did it to Peter Glaze a thousand years ago on Crackerjack. As Chris Tarrant used to say on Tiswas, this is what they want.

Ramsay is tough. His face appears to be an anthology of scars and, as sure as anything, those ravines that criss-cross it at 37 years of age are not laughter lines. He is given, as with the whipped cream episode, to alarming sudden gestures. Graphically demonstrating what he thinks of Bonapartes Restaurant's signature dish, he throws it and its silver platter into the local canal. The typeface on the opening captions of the show looks like scissors, but this man does not need kitchen knives to wound. His tongue is lacerating enough.

"This," he says of the kitchen at Bonapartes, "is a living fucking nightmare." And truly it is. You wouldn't really want to pee in it, let alone cook in it. The fridges are little shops of horror, "jam packed with shit". "This," Ramsay says, extracting a festering lump of brown, "looks like sheep turd that's been infested with ants." Fur grows on last week's uneaten dinners, shooting spores of penicillin around what is not already rancid. Invited to prepare their favourite dish for him, the restaurant's two chefs cook him scallops on mini black puddings in hollandaise sauce. In one of those moments that bless TV directors only a few times in a career, Ramsay throws up. The scallops were, to put it technically, "fucking minging".

The only factor that reduces the risk of an outbreak of food poisoning in West Yorkshire is that a mere two customers a night patronise this 40-seat basement restaurant. Bonapartes is in dire straits, but it is also in Silsden, a working-class northern town. The menu's stab at "fine dining" is all wrong for the location - which Ramsay demonstrates by taking to the streets and asking the local cloth caps to choose between his steak and ale pie and the scallops. It's no contest, as anyone but this head chef and his obtusely trusting employer, Sue Ray, would guess.

What is wrong with this place is the signature at the bottom of the menu card: Tim Gray. "Cooking," says Tim, "is like being an artist." But we soon discern what sort of artist he is - and the qualifier begins with "p". "He must," says Ramsay to Sue upon introduction, "be fucking good if he is a head chef at 21. Either that or he's a fucking good bullshitter." Let's plump for the second option. This youth has never even made an omelette until Ramsay asks him to do so. He does not know braising steak is for braising. ("Barbecue it?" he suggests when asked.) Like the bald man on the old instant gravy ads, he cannot tell beef from lamb or pork. The chief qualification on his CV is that he was once photographed next to Gary Rhodes at a Good Food Show. Even his admiring family find it hard to find anything good to say when Ramsay cruelly gets him to cook for them.

Ramsay has a week to turn these nightmare restaurants around. Incredibly, by the end of the week, by simplifying the menu to something near idiot-proof, Tim does a creditable job on Valentine's night and caters for 40. But Tim's dopey insolence fronts a near-infinite capacity to absorb criticism without learning from it. When Ramsay returns a month later, the kitchen is a cesspit once more, Tim has resumed giving Sue lip, and the covers are back down to two a night. (Who are this pair?) Finally, Tim is fired.

So who is really behaving badly here? It is not Ramsay, whose pride in his profession is genuinely insulted by Bonapartes. It is Tim and the hundreds of cocky chefs like him up and down the country, but particularly in the provinces, who provide appalling meals at inflated prices to customers who would not dream of eating as badly at home. Tough meat drenched in disgusting sauces, slag heaps of overcooked veg, chips fried in rancid oil, damp baps draining themselves on paper serviettes, vast platters that announce "never mind the quality" - this is eating in Britain today. That 600 tragically challenged restaurants applied to be featured on this programme, each willing to be humiliated in return for Ramsay's healing touch, testifies to the crisis.

Last week, my local burger bar in Clapham, Real Burger World, was featured on Channel 4's Risking It All. It was a blandly told story of entrepreneurial instinct - in this case, the notion that fast food need not be unhealthy - sinking beneath commercial reality. Kitchen Nightmares is nothing like as benign a show. Its subject is a level of national culinary incompetence that may be unique in the world. Ramsay is right to be effing furious.

Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the Times

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