Gordon Ramsay (22 page)

When it came to teaching the celebrities, other professionals said he was getting it right, however. ‘Gordon is not the bullying one-trick pony he has been accused of being,’ said Jonathan Cormack, a consultant at human resources giant the Hay Group. ‘If you look carefully you
see he is always encouraging the chef to pass on tips and expertise and he asks questions of his staff that show he is trying to understand what motivates them.’

‘He lets people make their own mistakes and then pulls them up for it. It may look horrible at times but it is effective,’ added occupational psychologist Marc Atherton.

But was everything that viewers saw on their screens a true depiction of life on set? Having spent her post-eviction hours reviewing some of the tapes, Amanda said most of what she had seen bore no resemblance to reality. Her biggest gripe was that, while the celebrities were in the kitchen from 8am to 4pm before having an hour’s break and then working from 5pm until midnight, the same could not be said of Gordon. ‘He is always presented as if he is tough, in control and in the kitchen all the time when he was only there three or four hours a day. The rest of the time it is left to his henchmen, Mark Sergeant and Angela Hartnett. No wonder he had all that energy to scream and shout when he did appear,’ she said.

Amanda also claimed clever editing had dramatically affected the way the events and the various personalities were presented. ‘The producers put what they want the audience to see on the screen, rather than what is actually happening. And that includes showing Ramsay in a very good light. No one saw what led up to me losing my temper. Instead, I was made to look like a mad old woman who couldn’t cope. I was made to look 98 instead of 68,’ she said of her infamous punch-up with Gordon.

She claimed the editors and producers were equally cruel about how they portrayed most of the other celebrities. ‘Belinda was shown as a snivelling wreck but
she is a highly intelligent woman and one of the best cooks there. And Matt Goss was made to look entirely placid when in fact he is hilariously funny and kind. Abi, meanwhile, was made to look angelic when in reality she talked dirty about sex almost non-stop. I am as broadminded as they get, but there is a line to draw and she was disgusting. Edwina, meanwhile, is made to appear selfish in the programme whereas in reality she was like a mother to us all.’

Well, she was like a mother to everyone except Gordon.

What was dubbed ‘The Edwina and Gordon Show’ became one of the other gripping and most memorable elements of the series. It had been an inspired idea to put someone as famously forthright as the former Cabinet Minister Edwina Currie into
Hell’s Kitchen
– with an extra culinary frisson coming from the fact that she had triggered a financial crisis in the food industry and been forced to resign as Health Minister in 1988 after saying most of the country’s egg production was infected with salmonella. Having left Parliament and reinvented herself as a best-selling novelist, she had stormed back into the public eye in 2002 after it was revealed that she had had a two-year affair with the famously grey former Prime Minister John Major – an affair he later described as ‘the most shameful event’ of his life.

From the start, Edwina was ready to admit that she knew next to nothing about cooking. ‘I thought aspic was something you put down the loo till Gordon told me it was some kind of savoury jelly,’ she said. And the pre-show catering training that the group had done in west London before the show proper had begun had terrified her even
more. ‘I was so worried about how little I knew that I headed straight for my favourite pub, the Castle, near my home in Surrey, and worked as a kitchen slave for a weekend. That meant that on arrival in Gordon’s domain I knew what to expect: fiendish hard work and intense pressure, especially during “service”, when customers are waiting.’

What Edwina thought she had also learned was a way to deal with the legendary Ramsay temper. ‘Christian, the chef at the Castle, had warned me that nothing said in a kitchen is ever personal and not to take it home. But I was ill-prepared for the endless foul-mouthed abuse – most of it counterproductive – that came our way in
Hell’s Kitchen
. Sometimes I found it hilarious. I would wag my finger at Gordon when they weren’t filming and tell him, “You wouldn’t say that to your mother!” And “To someone my age, you are an infant not long out of your pram. How about acting like a grown-up?” That left him spluttering. If I didn’t agree with something, I would also give Gordon a special look, one my mother used to do as well. It was a sort of “Who do you fucking think you are?” look without saying a single word. And for someone very verbal, such as Gordon, that was hard to deal with.’

Of course, long looks were not the only cross Gordon had to bear when it came to Edwina. Her souffles, and the drama that always accompanied whether they rose or fell, became another abiding moment of the show. As did the rows over her signature dish – the infamously greasy guinea-fowl confit. And the amount of salt in her risottos. Mix in all the other workers’ various idiosyncrasies and it was easy to see the kitchen as a madhouse. Jennifer was triggering threatening letters from health and safety
officers who said the restaurant would be closed down if she didn’t stop wiping her nose on her tea towel, Matt was endlessly emotional, James was endlessly tearful, while Al seemed endlessly frustrated. ‘The official nurses were on duty only intermittently, but a psychiatrist was available at all times,’ confirmed Edwina when the madhouse comparison was put to her.

Fortunately for the for mer politician, the public seemed to prefer her histrionics to the more muted charms of Abi Titmuss. Gordon’s ‘hot totty’ was the loser when she and Edwina went head to head in a public vote – much to Gordon’s disgust. ‘Edwina is like your old granny who just won’t fucking die. This is a fucking disgrace,’ Gordon moaned, head in hands after the announcement was made and he prepared to say goodbye to the Television X presenter.

However, losing Edwina at this stage would have meant missing out on what became one of the most famous quotes of the year. Having variously called Edwina ‘poisonous’, ‘diseased’ and ‘a pathetic bitch’, Gordon really let rip in a massive row when he focused on her shock affair with John Major. ‘One minute you are shagging the Prime Minister and now you are trying to shag me from behind,’ he roared – in a clip that would compete against his own ‘Scallop-gate’ throwing-up incident from
Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares
in the battle for Best Factual Entertainment Moment of 2004. (In the event, neither Ramsay moment won: Jennie Bond got the award for her time lying underground in a rat-filled coffin in
I’m A Celebrity … Get Me Out Of Here!
)

Back in the Brick Lane kitchen, things were proceeding
just as staff at the group’s original training centre had predicted. The staff at Ealing, Hammersmith and West London College had distilled the show’s structure into an eight-step recipe. ‘Step One: Take one no-nonsense chef with a reputation for straight-talking. Step Two: Add ten celebrities with barely an ounce of cooking expertise between them. Step Three: After a short amount of intensive training, place them all in the kitchens of London’s newest and most exclusive restaurant. Step Four: Add to the mix a generous handful of celebrity diners and a sharp, critical viewing public to judge them. Step Five: Leave them all to simmer, removing any unwanted celebrities. Step Six: Turn up the heat on the remaining wannabe chefs, slowly evaporating more from the mix. Step Seven: Raise the temperature to the maximum and stand back as the remaining few come to the boil. Step Eight: Allow the public’s taste to decide who should be the UK’s newest celebrity chef.’ After the attack on Edwina and Abi’s surprising eviction, it looked as if everyone was well on their way to Step Seven.

But, as it turned out, it wasn’t to be the hopeful celebrity chefs who were next to feel the heat. That weekend, the Sunday newspapers had a massive and potentially career-destroying shock up their sleeves for Gordon himself. They had just dug up an extraordinarily embarrassing incident from his past. And they were going to splash full details of it all over their pages.

‘Gordon Ramsay, a drunken night out and gross indecency with two male chefs’ was the shock
Mail on Sunday
headline that broke the story in the middle weekend of
Hell’s Kitchen
. ‘Celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay
was cautioned for gross indecency after an incident with two other men in the lavatory of a London tube station. The married father of four, currently starring in ITV’s hit reality show
Hell’s Kitchen
, was arrested along with two other chefs after they were caught by the station manager,’ the story began.

With papers such as the
Sunday Mirror
running the story under headlines like ‘Flasher Gordon’, it all seemed to resemble the ‘lewd behaviour’ that caused George Michael to be arrested in a public toilet in Los Angeles back in 1998. But Gordon’s spokeswoman, Jo Barnes, was quick to play down all aspects of her client’s brief brush with the law – which she said had been completely misinterpreted and had taken place more than a decade earlier.

‘This incident took place in the early hours after a night of drinking and celebrating with friends which culminated in the three of them drunkenly horsing around in the loos of Green Park tube station. The station master, disturbed by the commotion, got the wrong end of the stick and notified the police, who arrested Gordon and the others upon leaving the loos. They were taken to West End Central Police Station where they received a caution.’

It had all happened back in March 1993 when Gordon had been learning his trade in Paris and had been back in London visiting friends. ‘There was no court appearance involved. This was a complete boys’ lark and there was nothing sexual involved,’ continued Jo. ‘This was a bunch of 20-something blokes, very, very drunk, messing around. As I understand it, they were in advanced stages of drunkenness and one of them was having a pee in the sink. The other one was running around with his trousers
around his ankles and Gordon was actually just at a urinal with his head slumped against the wall. I think he was sick at one stage.’

Gordon himself did not discuss the incident either at the time or when news of it made the headlines in 2004. And he has never spoken of it since. Asked if he was embarrassed by the revelations, his spokeswoman said, ‘You look back on yourself in your early twenties and you cringe a bit, don’t you? I think there are lots of things we have done under the influence of alcohol that we are embarrassed about. Gordon does not really drink now, although not as a direct result of this incident. He is just a bit embarrassed about being a drunken idiot.’ She also said that Gordon and his friends had accepted their cautions, as ‘they wanted to get out of the police station as fast as possible’.

After a weekend reading revelations like those, coming back to work with television cameras rolling and millions watching was not for the faint-hearted. But come back Gordon did. The show had to go on and he hit the ground running as normal at the next morning’s roll-call. In some ways, he actually had more reason for optimism as the restaurant’s two-week stint drew to a close. The chefs were managing to produce quality food and diners were managing to get served, albeit after some long delays. An unhappy Al Murray was next to be evicted, donating nearly £23,000 to the disability charity Scope in the process. His departure left Edwina, Matt, James and Jennifer in contention for the top prize.

To Gordon’s clear relief, Edwina lasted just one more day, then headed home to find friends had bought her a
joke present of two Gordon Ramsay cookbooks, each with a knife sticking out of it. ‘Thank God that is all over. I’m going to sleep for two days solid and eat nothing but Chinese and Indian meals and egg sandwiches,’ she said. Having done so, she was ready to pass on her opinions of kitchen staff, her reasons for going on the show and, of course, of Gordon himself.

‘I certainly developed a huge respect for anyone who works in a kitchen,’ she said when the first subject was raised. ‘Never again will I complain about a delay in a restaurant and I will always, always pay compliments for excellence.’

So why had she gone on a reality-television show? Partly to earn a decent amount of money, she was happy to admit, but also to get the chance to generate a large donation for her chosen charity, Marie Curie Cancer Care. And she said she was also keen to work with Gordon. ‘It was a chance of a lifetime to work alongside him. He is one of Europe’s great young chefs and a man passionately committed to good food. People would pay a fortune for that and there I was at the master’s elbow,’ she said. But, while it was no surprise that she hadn’t enjoyed the experience, her overall analysis of his role in the show was sober stuff.

‘Sadly, I have to say that I experienced a slide in my admiration for him,’ she said. ‘A man of his awesome stature should not be wasting his effort on a reality-television show like this. He didn’t succeed in the challenge. Ten celebrities were not turned into top cooks, but were ground down by exhaustion and pain. Most would say he would have achieved a better result in a
calmer atmosphere, but how interesting would that have been on our screens?’

In the Brick Lane restaurant, the celebrity diners – who now included Max Clifford, Jordan, Jerry Springer, Stephanie Beacham, Chris Eubank, Jade Goody, James Hewitt, Esther Rantzen and Sophie Anderton – may have taken exception to Edwina’s view that Gordon hadn’t produced any top cooks. The general feeling was that the standard of food being served was rising fast and was as good as you could expect in many, more established restaurants.

And the entertainment factor in the dining room remained equally high. The room itself was widely condemned as ugly – Steve Weids, manager of Harvey Nichols’s wine department, memorably described the decor as ‘Caravaggio meets porn’ – but the personalities there easily made up for it. One of the ongoing sideshows to the events in the kitchen was Gordon’s increasingly fraught relationship with Belgian head waiter Jean-Philippe Susilovic – immediately described as the Manuel to Gordon’s Basil Fawlty. Jean-Philippe, or JP, had been drafted into
Hell’s Kitchen
from Gordon’s newly relocated Petrus and was well aware of his head chef’s volatility. It was just as well. ‘I think Gordon actually felt he couldn’t shout at the celebrities as much as he wanted to,’ he said after one particularly stressful evening in Brick Lane. ‘So he shouts at me instead.’ Always trying to soothe relations between Gordon in the kitchen and the group of angry celebrities in the dining room hungry for both food and publicity, Jean-Philippe was widely tipped as a possible candidate to replace Kofi Annan as head of the United
Nations. ‘It would be an easier job,’ he admitted after yet another expletive-strewn flare-up with his boss.