Selling Britain to the World

The MasterChef Phenomenon

From the bland food of everyday Britain in the 1990s to the world class cuisine of London in 2017, the recreation of British food culture is a feat of storytelling. In this post, we look at why the world bought the myth of British food culture and how it created a new identity for a nation which barely cooks.

It could be argued that the enormous success of food TV from the late 1990s was responsible for changing television narratives.  Pat Llewellyn’s production company, Optomen is an international distributor of format shows such as Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, Great British Menu, The F-Word, Mary: Queen of Shops, Police, Camera Action! and Two Fat Ladies, with offices in London and New York. Jane Root’s Nutopia is based in London and Washington DC with cross platform huge scale documentary series such as How We got to Now (PBS, BBC2) and The Story of Us (History Channel). Mark Thompson left the BBC to become Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of The New York Times Company leading its digital innovation in cross platform storytelling. 

With the voracious appetite of new channels devoted to food, a successful format was the Holy Grail in TV by the early 2000s. Formats and food are a perfect partnership. Academic, Tasha Oren says that television’s survival now ‘depends on the domestic, ritualised predictability that measured and stable duplication and recombination allow’. Innovation, she says, can only happen within conventions, what she calls ‘the primary logic of television itself’.

A winning idea can be highly lucrative for both producer and buyer; Jamie Munro, former managing director of Shine International explained why. ‘The reason you’re buying a TV format is (because) most commissioners are quite conservative and they realise that if a programme of theirs fails, they’re out of a job. They’ve spent a lot of money on it and there’s a real risk. So what most territories around the world tend to do is buy formats. They say ‘ok you’ve developed this, you’ve made this, you’ve learned from your mistakes and I can buy some of your success by buying a kit which will tell me how to do it and get some help from some flying producers who will tell me how to do it and give me that consultancy’’.  Seamus Geoghegan said that there was a moment when the penny dropped at the BBC; ‘I think that word – the format – raised its head, over and above everything: ‘Oh, I get it, and it can travel’, and ‘Oh, and the rights involved at the back end’. With budget constraints, there was suddenly a new way of thinking about production; if it was commercially attractive, Geoghegan said ‘there’s a way of greasing the wheels.’

One of the most powerful examples of how distribution affects narratives is the MasterChef format, which has sold to more than 50 territories around the world in a deal between BBC Worldwide and Shine International. Jamie Monro drove the deal to extend the original BBC2 show beyond the broadcast platform.  The deal included plans to create live events, pioneered by the BBC Good Food show, and rebranding MasterChef as MasterChef Live. ‘Bookazines’ and part works, a branded MasterChef website would give it its own identity, with licence to create a cross platform, on/off screen experience.

MasterChef developed from an original idea by TV executives, Franc Roddam and John Silver as a Sunday afternoon watch on BBC2 in 1990 to primetime entertainment on BBC1 in February 2005 under the. It is now broadcast in 200 countries worldwide including 47 locally-produced versions.  Jamie Munro told me how it happened: ‘It evolved as a brand, but as an entertainment brand rather than a food brand. What helped it as a show was that it started early evening so your kids started watching it quite young. They watched it after school - what else was there to watch? Then when it went to prime time, it took that audience with it.’  

Munro was behind a multi-series three-year deal with the BBC in 2009, offering Shine a platform into the international arena.   Initially, the format was sold to lifestyle channels rather than the mainstream channels, but after its phenomenal success in Australia and America (where Gordon Ramsay was one of the judges), it became the brightest star in the food TV firmament. ‘Australia led the way,’ said Munro. ‘‘It went massive there and then went full circle when some of the Australian influences came back in the UK show.  The thing about MasterChef is that although it’s about food, it’s actually a competition. The UK series is still on not much more than a daytime budget but in Australia they’re on an X Factor style budget.’

The presidential debate in Australia was even rescheduled to avoid being up against the final of MasterChef. ‘It got 50% plus share’, said Munro. ‘That’s down to the producers there who took it as it was and supersized it.’ Seamus Geoghegan was at BBC Worldwide at the time. ‘John (Torode) and Gregg (Wallace) were already doing what they doing here, but it was quiet. It was a tame version. Australia – as only Australians can – turned up the heat, got the whole studio lights thing and whopped it, as they say.’ 

Peter Bazalgette agreed; ‘MasterChef was a frankly rather staid little show, rather archly presented. It was Australia that reinvented it and it became a massive asset.’ Shine continues to support the show in its various territories; CEO, Nadine Nohr said ‘It’s a very crowded market for cooking, and MasterChef is the mother of cooking formats. It keeps selling into new territories, and the rate of re-order is amazing. That’s because of the strength of the format and the nurturing it gets from the Shine Group in terms of remaking it and remaining true to its essence.’

MasterChef has launched its winners to astonishing success, with books and TV deals as well as restaurants which fans; in Australia, Poh Ling Yeow who was runner-up on the first series in 2009 has become a television superstar with three successful cookbooks and featured in two headline television shows, four films and one TV series.  Former electrician, Andy Allen who won season four in 2012 is now owner and head chef at Sydney’s The Blue Ducks while also launching his own YouTube cookery channel   Julie Goodwin who won the first season in Australia has since conquered the both the cooking and media industry with the publication of six cooking books as well as a bizarre CD of Christmas song and recipes. She had a regular weekly cooking segment on Channel Nine's Today show before appearing as a contestant on I'm A Celebrity...Get Me Out Of Here!  She now hosts a breakfast radio segment on Star 104.5 which broadcasts across the New South Wales central coast.

As a format show, it has a different identity in each country but in English speaking territories such as Australia, South Africa and USA, its cast of experts is an international fusion; in the UK, New Zealander chef (John Torode) and French chef (Michel Roux)  are matched with greengrocer, Gregg Wallace, while in USA and Australia, the judges are a mix of indigenous chefs, restaurateurs and British stars with Gordon Ramsay in US and Nigella Lawson, Jason Atherton and Marco Pierre White in Australia.  Munro says that the judges empower the audience to play the food expert. ‘For a competition show like X Factor or Britain’s Got Talent, you sit at home and you’re the judge.  With MasterChef how do you really understand how good it is? You’re looking at something but you can see the expression on the judges’ faces, but you’re then saying that’s good food.’ 

‘It’s more than a food format, it’s an aspirational show and shows how people can change their lives,’ Joe Bastianich, a judge on the US version on Fox told TBI Vision.  ‘For some people the food is irrelevant and it’s just about the people, and for others it’s all about the food and the process,’ The back stories he refers to have included a wedding in Australia. The couple went on to open a successful Melbourne restaurant. 

The success of MasterChef across the world was a significant factor in the development of Food TV, with whole channels now dedicated to broadcasting food programmes, many of them formats which were bought from other territories.  Nick Thorogood of Food Network explained how the channel contributed to the explosion in cookery programmes worldwide in 2005 and tapped into a new C2D audience. ‘There was a gigantic step up’, he told me. ‘Food Network particularly did a massive reinvention of its schedule with some really well invested shows that had a different ambition and went from the ‘in the kitchen’ to much more entertaining TV with high production values.’ Food TV had lived on the Daytime schedule, the domain of the C2D audience; ‘It was only when it moved out and started getting little hits in other bits of the schedule that people started saying ‘hold on, what do we have to do to get into peak space?’ Hell’s Kitchen and, of course MasterChef both went into mainstream entertainment slots and really did a huge job of shifting that perception.’

Food Network was already making some big shows like Food Network Challenge in the US. ‘You’d get four fruit carvers’ said Thorogood, ‘and they’d have to carve a fruit representation of Hawaii in eight hours, filmed in front of an arena audience. It was huge scale with loads of ambition and winnings of $10,000. It was the same with a show called Chopped. In many ways it’s like multiple rounds of Ready Steady Cook because they open a basket and there’s ingredients you have to cook with but the scale of it, the production values are so high. Look at Iron Chef America where you take what looks like a simple idea but add layers of production values that turned it into a big arena show.’

With wider audiences blasting food TV out of its middle class niche, the food channels went shopping for programmes.  ‘America, UK, Australia or Australasia – they’re the three countries that have driven TV food and that kind of lifestyle,’ said Thorogood. ‘We were looking around the world to see who had the best programmes and the best looking. The best quality, although not (those with) the biggest budgets, were Australian.’ By the early 2000s British programmes such as The Naked Chef and Nigella Bites appeared on American and Australian TV and were gently mimicked, with Neil Perry protogee, Kylie Kwong cooking food inspired by her mother on Australia’s ABC from 2003 and the Lifestyle Channel’s Bill’s Food launching Bill Granger in 2004 as the Australian Jamie Oliver.

I asked Jamie Munro who was responsible for the distribution of MasterChef if a rather old fashioned idea of Britain helped to sell food programmes. ‘I think if it’s BBC it definitely helps. Going round the world – any part of it - and being part of the BBC definitely helps.’ The BBC, he explained is associated with quality.  ‘I would say that the UK TV market is the best in terms of quality in the world.’

But Susan Elkington, formerly an executive at TV distributor, Chellomedia suggested that a British influence on food culture worldwide is a big assumption. ‘I don't think we make the best programmes’, she said. ‘We're obsessed that we've got the best news and sport. But Al Jazeera is much better. Allo Allo and Broadchurch sell well but we've been exporting documentaries and natural history for much longer.’ We may be great storytellers with high production values, but in terms of influence on the high street, Elkington suggested that audiences are not so fickle.  ‘Take Spain,’ she told me. ‘Everyone on the street would know Jamie Oliver, but when they go home, they won't buy anything other than Spanish food.  You may know who Brad Pitt is but you’ll marry a Spanish man.’ MasterChef may have appeared on Spanish TV since 2013, but Elkington believes that the audience is interested in the competition that pitches ordinary people who love food against each other rather than an example of successful British storytelling.  ‘Food TV is very good in Britain’, she said, ‘but it’s not the best.’

Niki Page, formerly of Freemantle which distributes Jamie Oliver programmes around the world, and head of acquisitions at Sky Factual and Factual Entertainment, told me in terms of content, that after America, British TV ties with Canada and Australia in joint second place. ‘We thought that there was more value in some factual programming than there actually was’, she said. ‘But I think the genuine explosion was lifestyle. You can watch factual entertainment which is more niche but lifestyle programming is about something you want to become. You want to escape your everyday drudgery, family, kids and go into this stylish life.’  I asked her why the world wanted to buy Jamie.  ‘Our food programme making is so much better than the US’ she explained.  ‘It’s very stylish. Lorraine Pascal is a super model. She’s beautiful and she can cook. She’s so stylised and stylish and you think ‘right I’m going to buy the book and cook like her and be like her’.  The US is more mumsy. Even though the demographic is probably the same, the chefs tends to be a bit older like Martha Stewart and Anna Olsen.’

Peter Bazalgette said the success of so many British food shows abroad, including his Ready Steady Cook was more about a triumph in storytelling than the appeal of the food culture that they represented. ‘We have a genius for taking factual information and essentially formatting it, giving it a narrative, giving it entertainment quality – a human quality’, he said. I suggested that with an unstable food culture such as ours, it is easier to tell stories which appeal to those we tell it to and Bazalgette agreed; ‘We use food as a vehicle. That’s the truth. I was using food as a vehicle to entertain people. Actually I happen to care about it because I love food, but I was really using it as a vehicle. Come Dine With Me uses food as a vehicle in entertainment wars. Can I entertain better than you? It’s home vanity, which Changing Rooms was about as well. And House Proud and all that stuff. We’ve used food as a vehicle rather than something as a starting point as we didn’t have a starting point.’

But Elkington put the impact of British TV’s influence in perspective; ‘McDonald's has bigger impact on indigenous food culture. You don't need to overstate it. It’s just TV entertainment’.  She suggested that the Internet is more important than linear TV channels as audiences search, discover and share food. Food bloggers, Youtubers and ordinary people sharing pictures and recipes raise the interest in everyday food. ‘People want to participate’, she said. She argued that in such a multi-platform viewing culture, successful imported lifestyle formats like the Jamie Oliver shows are about something more powerful than reminding audiences how to cook; she believes that they are enabling; ‘There's the programme and then there's psyche. It allows the flowering of the personality, the self. It allows you to self-actualise through food. TV unlocks that which is most interesting. It's not an end in itself. It’s not that there's more British food being made in Spain or France. There simply isn’t.’ 

From Taste and the TV Chef, Gilly Smith, 2020. Reproduced with permission from Intellect Books. You can buy the book here.