Good food is on the menu

JUST one three-course meals stands between the three finalists and judges John Torode and Gregg Wallace deciding which one will succeed last year’s victor Natalie Coleman.

This final is tougher than ever, and if the contestants are feeling nervous, they ought to be. After a formidable eightweek competition, the trio must push themselves to the limit one last time.

Tonight’s episode marks the end of a tenth successful series. But just what is the winning recipe for such a well-loved format? Torode thinks it could be the programme’s simplicity and a lack of drama among the contestants.

“At the end of the day, I’m a cook and as a cook, that’s what I do. My job is not to put drama in. It’s just to tell people what’s really going on. I’m the narrator, and also I’m the person who’s there to teach and push the competitors. What I do is celebrate success, and great food.

I don’t celebrate mediocrity and I don’t celebrate bad food. Everyone needs to remember that Gregg and I have to eat what’s created on the show,” he says.

Torode moved to the UK in the 1990s and after first appearing on television on ITV’s This Morning, he’s been presenting MasterChef since 2005. But don’t mention the words TV chef in front of him.

“I wasn’t on TV to become a chef. I became a chef and was a chef for 21 years before I did MasterChef,” he says.

Blue Bloods
(Sky Atlantic, 8pm)

SPECULATION was rife last year that this New York-set family of cops show wasn’t going to be recommissioned for a fourth season.

But, thankfully, the Irish-American clan led by Frank Reagan was allowed to put the cuffs on a few more bad uns for another 22 adventures, which finish this week. Mustachioed Tom Selleck bristles in his best role in years as police commissioner Frank, who has never-ending crusades to avoid becoming the Jeremy Clarkson of cop commanders. Donnie Wahlberg enjoys himself as Frank’s son and tough-guy detective Danny. Bridget Moynahan is his daughter Erin, an assistant district attorney in Manhattan.

Will Estes is Frank’s youngest child, Jamie, who is probably getting a little long in the tooth to be the police rookie, having quit law after graduating from Harvard Law School.

The moral dilemmas are plentiful, particularly as Frank lives with his dad Henry (Len Cariou), who is a former police commissioner. Each week the rampaging Reagans sit down for a family dinner to, hopefully, chew more than the fat. The season finale sees Danny and Frank again taking on evil elements of their own department.

The Story of Women and Art
(BBC2, 9pm)

VISIT most of the world’s major galleries and museums, and you’ll find that the majority of the work in them is by men.

Does this mean that women have struggled to find creative outlets, or could it be that there have always been great female artists, but their work hasn’t always been recognised? Professor Amanda Vickery tends towards the latter explanation and, in this new series, she tells the stories of some of the remarkable women who have overcome some huge obstacles to fulfil their artistic ambitions.

It’s a tale that will span 500 years, but it begins in Renaissance Italy, as Vickery looks at the work of sculptress Properzia de Rossi, who honed her skills on peach stones, and a portraitist Sofonisba Anguissola, whose subjects included the most powerful figures in 16th-Century Europe.