A few years back I walked out of my front door very early in the morning to go to work and watched sleepily as a large car endlessly reversed, went forward, reversed, then went forward, trying to escape a wrong turn down the driveway.
It was an engrossing spectacle: urgently and skilfully done, but also expressive of some kind of epic, cinematic impatience. Eventually I went to squeeze past. At which point a striking image loomed against the steamed-up window: a face, instantly recognisable as belonging to the celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay, shouting what was clearly the word “Fuck”, caught in the glow of the streetlights at 5.30am in the privacy of his own car.
I didn’t really follow the TV chef industry at the time. But from that moment I became a massive Ramsay fan, mainly because he is clearly the real deal. The rage is authentic. Behind the angry mask is an actual angry face. Here is a man who shouts fuck like no one is watching.
It is a deeply attractive quality. Anything Gordon Ramsay cooks for you would obviously be mind-numbingly good. I think it would also feel punitive and righteous, a plate of bacon and eggs slammed down so hard on the table bits of it fly off, so delicious it makes you weep with gratitude, even as Gordon calls you a fuckwit sandwich and then expertly, lovingly stabs you in the eye with a fine French caper skewer.
Ramsay has remained No 1 for me. His public-private life still seems endlessly lavish, impervious to questions of scale, the life of a silk-scarved mayoral candidate in a Batman film. He is also very Christmassy, as all celebrity chefs must be. Although in this case it feels more like a manifestation of some deep festive dad-rage energy, those moments when just trying to do something nice with herbs can generate a day-long sulk because other people have opinions on types of vinegar now.
With this in mind it was fascinating to read in the Times about Ramsay’s plans for his Christmas this year, which falls in between opening three restaurants, a cooking school and a bar in a skyscraper that is also, yeah why not, “the highest restaurant in Europe”.
First up is a party for 300 people on Christmas Eve. From there it’s all about “not stressing out”, from a champagne breakfast of scrambled eggs on homemade brioche with shaved white truffle, to 25 people for dinner, which is fine because the house has recently had a vast new basement dug out, probably with Gordon’s own hand using a Japanese steel filleting knife because all builders are lazy twat-heads.
After that it’s six days of celebration and a New Year’s Eve party, capped with a week in Cornwall to recover and relax. During this time Gordon will recover and relax by trying to beat the Olympic super-athlete Adam Peaty in a triathlon. Most controversially, in the middle of all this Ramsay advocates ditching Christmas turkey in favour of making your own beef wellington, a move that has sparked a degree of online rage.
Yes, beef wellington is obviously much nicer than turkey. All Christmas food is basically terrible. Nobody actually likes Christmas pudding. It tastes of earth. No Christmas burger or pizza has ever been as nice as a Margarita. These things shouldn’t really exist. The flavours are a ritual hangover from a time when you could only get stuff that can be kept in a jar, raisins, glacé cherries, mince pie mulch, pickled goblin head, the dark years before blueberries and pesto.
Obviously turkey can’t be measured against a beef wellington, with its incredible textures, fat-soaked crispy pastry, pink marbled meat, the ooze of butter and duxelles mushrooms. This is basically cheating. It’s not real. Take it away. Perhaps the European Court can declare it unlawful.
On the face of it this might not have much to do with the same-day announcement of the latest proposal for football’s European Super League. Although I can confirm that clicking away and reading instead about Ramsay’s Christmas is a very good way of avoiding having to study the details of the latest power grab, disguised this time beneath a transparent greed-washing flimflam about looking after the little guy.
A new Super League announcement has of course become a Christmas ritual in its own right. The current one is pitched, with a leer of phoney piety, as just an attempt to play by the rules. This is presumably related to the ECJ ruling that new competitions do actually have a right to exist as long as they are demonstrably “inclusive” and based on merit.
So there is talk of consultation with “stakeholders”, chat about how this is all an honest attempt to fix the game for the fans. Look at the detail and it all seems pretty boring and pointless. There will basically be loads of matches. We already have those. It would trash the idea of genuine mobility. It would devalue every domestic league. It would be good for the richest non-English clubs and good for English clubs who dislike the Premier League.
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Is it for real? For now everyone is being stiff and polite. The EU is watching. There is no real reserve of popular anger to rely on. Whether it could eventually happen or not probably comes down to two things. Do the clubs want it? And related, where is the funding actually coming from, given the free-to-air model makes little sense?
Two elements could provide leverage here. It is impossible to predict what Manchester City and Abu Dhabi might do if they fall foul of the Premier League tribunal. Here at least is a way in. More intriguing, but so far totally absent, is the idea of support from some game-changing tech giant.
This is not as wild as it sounds. Major change has often come from technology. The Premier League is a child of the dear old clanky jug-eared satellite dish. The streaming model trailed by the new Super League vehicle is the one really interesting thing about it. Football is still tied to TV production companies. It won’t be for ever.
Beyond this what does the Super League actually have to offer? In effect, nothing at all apart from more of someone else’s pre-existing colour, loyalty, love and support, qualities built from the ground up over many years.And this is where Ramsay’s sensational beef wellington absolutism seems to come wading back into the room, bumping the door open, swinging round, clanking that fat-soaked pastry parcel down on the table.
The guiding principle here is more games between the bigger clubs, more juice and jam now, more eyeballs per annum on a product that has already stratified itself into this corner. The message is basically: beef wellington all the time.
Transform this thing into a non-stop highlights reel. Let us have big names, big branding, great dripping revenue-raking mouthfuls. The thing is, people quite like their rituals, the dry meat that give us context. Whereas, endless beef wellington is the quickest way to make all the beef wellington the same, all the beef wellington dull, even if a few people will get fat in the process.
