After the success of Come Dine With Me – including the SA version screened last year – another series makes its way on to the small screen on the BBC Lifestyle channel.
This time, aficionados of the cooking show genre can salivate over Come Dine With Me: Supersized, which promises a healthy serving of drama along with the food served.
There are various reasons that this series has been a success with viewers across the globe. For starters, the interest in food is universal. Given the reality format, where the dinner disasters and delights are captured to brilliant effect on camera, the grouping of the oddball guests spice up the show.
And the personalities, from the snobbish to the Zen-like to the introverted and the über-bitchy, unfailingly surface as the dinner party progresses. Don’t even get me started on the fault-finders and those who get pernickety about what they will and won’t eat.
My ultimate best, amid the brewing pandemonium at the dinner table, is the constant tongue-in-cheek chirpings of narrator Dave Lamb.
In Come Dine With Me: Supersized, which features six episodes divided into five segments, the amateur chefs are from Brighton, East Sussex, North East London, Peterborough, Bury, Warwickshire and Barnsley.
The series starts with visual artist Pasha du Valentine, comedian John O’Sullivan, urban DJ Melody Kane, Alistair James, a founding member of the Pie Club, and Antoine/Ana, a transvestite.
If there was ever a recipe for personality clashes, this episode would certainly be right up there, what with Pasha’s meals being scoffed at by her unsatisfied guests, John’s unconventional entertaining methods not quite getting the response he hoped for and Alistair having to quash the brewing catfight between Melody and Pasha to ensure that it doesn’t affect their scoring of his meal.
Other highlights include banker and fitness fanatic Ryan Waters trying to win over his guests with the “caveman diet” in the second episode.
Believing it is the key to healthy living, he decorates his bachelor pad with fake animal pelts and dons a caveman outfit in which he looks more like a Zulu warrior.
In the third episode, teacher James Perkin decides to serve up a Sri Lankan curry, but it remains to be seen whether his fellow diners are as impressed with his piquant cuisine.
Antonia Dallow, a bona fide kugel, surfaces in episode five and, well, let’s just say her personality is as indigestible as her dinner party hostess skills.
In the final episode, part-time drag queen Christian Whitely-Mason, proves he is dazzling in the wardrobe department but a plain Jane in the kitchen.
For viewers not as stupefied by the SA version of MasterChef now screening on M-Net, Come Dine With Me: Supersized is a show that is deliciously engaging, with contestants who don’t hold back on their sarcasm or rudeness – especially when they are subjected to below par and rather pedestrian dishes. And don’t even get me started on the wrath that is unleashed should there be a conspicuous absence of booze.
• Come Dine With Me: Supersized airs on BBC Lifestyle (DStv channel 180) on April 20 at 7pm.