The rise and fall of the TV chef | Tim Hayward

There may never be another Jamie Oliver or Gordon Ramsay. Why would today’s young chefs be interested in working in food television?

For almost as long as there has been TV, there have been cooks on it – from 1940s original Philip Harben to the Sainted Delia – but it was around 1999 that TV producer Pat Llewellyn, in a blaze of genius, brought Jamie Oliver and Gordon Ramsay to life on our screens, in sweaty whites and clogs, but repositioned as sexy. These weren’t TV presenters with some distant history of cooking or food writing, these were real chefs and we were going to share their lives and love them like rock stars.

Celebrity chefs with one foot in the kitchen and one on the studio floor became the dominant phenomenon of British media and for a couple of decades, the overwhelming ambition of many young cooks was to break into TV, while the image – mercurial, driven, invariably male, perfectionist, a Marco Pierre White filtered through his scion Ramsay – became a template. All that, though, is suddenly up for grabs. We’re witnessing a change in the peculiar relationship between chefs and celebrity.