Weaver's Week 2025-02-23

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Current revision as of 11:30, 23 February 2025

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This week, we're reviewing the latest format from the Glenn Hugill trunk o'whimsey.

Contents 1 Last Bite Hotel 1.1 Butternut Media and Wheelhouse for Food Network, shown here 15 January—20 February 1.2 Style and substance 1.3 Viewers said – naah 2 In other news 2.1 Quizzy Mondays

Last Bite Hotel

Butternut Media and Wheelhouse for Food Network, shown here 15 January—20 February

Take eight chefs, and put them in a hotel in the middle of nowhere. Before leaving, each contestant was allowed to "pack a trunk" with thirteen ingredients; these are the only ingredients they'll have for all of their dishes.

Our contestants pick their foods. They bring a bunch of proteins, meat and substitutes. There's a load of produce, fresh vegetables, maybe some fruit, eggs and milk. And there are pantry things, flour and seasoning and spices. During the first episode, we're introduced to all eight contestants, see the food they've brought with them, and perhaps get a little insight about their character.

Soon enough, we meet the star of the show, Tituss Burgess. He is the manager of the hotel, and the front desk receptionist, and the maitre'd, and quite possibly the cleaner as well. The one thing Tituss doesn't do is cook: his previous kitchen staff left under a cloud.

And, though he may be the only employee, Tituss has a hotel to run. And he has guests to feed. Well, he has one guest each night to feed, which might explain why his previous kitchen staff quit and took everything except for salt, pepper, and oil.

So these chefs – all regulars from other Food Network programmes, apparently – are going to cook the item ordered by the guest. Except there's a problem: they only have the original thirteen items, and once something has been used up, it will not be replaced. Our guest orders a side of fries but you've used up all your potatoes? You're just going to have to improvise. Come up with something that provides the same crunch and slurp as a potato chip, but made out of cauliflower. Or beetroot. Or breadcrumbs and butterbeans.

The various dishes are cooked up – in a kitchen that seems far too small for eight to work at the same time – and served to the visiting guest. And, by a massive stroke of fate, all of the visitors are also celebrity chefs familiar from other Food Network programmes. What an absolute coincidence!

Anyway, our visiting chef tastes all the dishes, and gives a little critique to the chef who made it; what worked, what could have been better. And the chef leaves feedback of who provided the best dish (they'll get a little key to wear on their overalls) and who provided the worst dish.

The worst dish means instant elimination. Our contestant chef is escorted to "Room 13", which contains something that's roughly an eighth as bad as the worst thing in the world. Contestants enter Room 13, and we don't see them leave.

The chef may be gone, but their food remains. Before their departure, the chef wrote a "will", dictating what should happen to the ingredients they had been using. Who will get first choice, or which chefs are to divvy up the grub between themselves, or just "oh, sort it out between yourselves and if you can't be quick you'll get nothing" Divided style. The various divisions and inheritances never repeated themselves during the series, everyone had to be on their toes each time.

Style and substance

We're a game show column, and we're mostly going to analyse Last Bite Hotel as a game show, not as a cookery show. (The cookery show analysis: vague and handwavey recipes, mostly to produce small tapas-style dishes, perhaps a few ideas to research. Far less of a tutorial than Delia Smith, more pressured than Mary Berry, not as much behind-the-sofa entertainment as Fanny Cradock.)

As a game show, Last Bite Hotel had a lot going for it. Tituss Burgess sets a high bar as a host who really gets into the game; he portrays a completely credible character, someone who is going slightly insane at his failing hotel. "The hotel... never... forgets", he croons at a few points. “An elimination already? I am pure evil!”

The obvious comparison is with Claudia Winkleman on The Traitors, someone who can take a rented mansion and make it feel like a complete world, isolated from the rest of society. And, like Claudia, Tituss plays his role with a twinkle in his eye, he knows that we know that it's all an act, and he's camping it up for our amusement – and his.

Last Bite Hotel has two levels of competition. There's a social game: some of the cooking is done in teams, where the best team is safe. It is possible and permissible for contestants to share or swap ingredients, perhaps with the hope of getting the favour back in a later challenge – or a later bequest. Three of the contestants played this social aspect, forming an alliance that took them to the final days.

And there's a chef-versus-machine competition. The cook has the ingredients they've brought, and that's it. Once they've used an egg, that's it, it's been used and it will not be replaced. When you're out of fennel, or finished your artichokes, they're gone.

One of the finalists brought chicken and eggs as her protein. Produce was fresh limes, fresh coriander, jalapenos, and spring onions; the pantry contained ginger, garlic, sugar, jasmine rice, coconut cream, curry paste, and fish sauce. Rice proved to be a very flexible choice, it can be used as it is, or can be ground into flour, or used sparingly to provide a bit of starchy texture in an otherwise smooth dish.

Other contestants went the whole hog, bringing a whole hog. A ruddy big pig has lots of bits that can be used – the rump, the back, the ears for crackling, and many more. The contestant who brought the porker had enough protein to last the week, and could concentrate on other ingredients from inheritances.

Although it wasn't mentioned on the show (this being a Yankee original, and their shows aren't required to be particularly honest with viewers), the contestants are surely briefed that they'll only be cooking savoury foods, and that they'll need to cook up to a dozen dishes during a week, and to bring quantities and amounts accordingly.

The whole concept of wills and bequests adds yet another layer into the equation. What is the strategy to win? Don't know; even after watching the series we cannot work out what the winner did to win, other than cook their best at all times.

"Blimey," we thought, "a cooking competition and a resource management problem and a social game? A genius is behind this." No surprise when we came to the credits and saw Glenn Hugill credited. His advice to The Banker made Deal or No Deal a multi-dimensional game of chess; his Possessed label gave us Cash Trapped and Spotless, and now the least unwatchable cookery contest in years.

Whoever avoids elimination and wins the final episode is the winner. They collect a prize of USD 25.000 (then € 23.000, £19,000). Not bad for a week's work. The rest, we must assume, will appear again on other Food Network programmes.

Viewers said – naah

This column was impressed by Last Bite Hotel. The theme wasn't overpowering, the competition had more layers than an onion, the hosting tickled our tastebuds, and there's satisfying depth in the inventiveness.

Over in North America, the show aired on successive Monday nights during September and October, perhaps trying to tap into some of the Hallowe'en spookiness, to limited audiences and minimal reviews. This side of the pond, the first three episodes went out on Food Network at 10pm, and cratered in the ratings so badly that the last three eps went out in the oh-so-prestigious 6am spot.

And it leaves us wondering why this high-concept show failed. Lots of different layers and sub-challenges, and familiar faces to help guide through them. Could it be too clever for Food Network, and more complex than the usual diet of "man feeds six from five loaves and some fishes"?

Where could a show like this fit on the domestic channels? Primetime ITV has advertiser-funded Cooking With the Stars, and we can't see Last Bite Hotel working in the bright glare of weekend daytime. Channel 5 has chosen a position that makes competitions like this almost impossible to imagine. We can just about see Channel 4 work with the concept and a more restrained host: take young chefs who are nearly at the end of their training, and make it as much about the feedback from professional chefs as it is about the other elements.

But if one element of Last Bite Hotel is going to appear, it's the restriction on ingredients. We can easily imagine a week of Masterchef The Professionals telling its contestants: pack ten ingredients, you'll make six dishes using those ingredients and nothing more. Some of you will leave the competition early, think about who would benefit from what you have left.

For this column, Last Bite Hotel is worth a look. There's no bad feeling, the players are genuinely supportive of each other, and celebrate their achievements in working with the food available to them. And the hosting is spot-on.

In other news

By a curious coincidence, Studio Lambert has also been thinking about wills and bequests. Their new show, The Inheritance, is more about disputes amongst the living. Twelve strangers work on missions to build up a stake in the deceased's fortune, and then use their social skills to demonstrate how they deserve the prize. Studio Lambert describe it as "part Knives Out, part Succession", references that leave us cold; we're getting The Traitors without any actual traitors. Anyway, Channel 4 have commissioned a series, which they'll transmit at some point.

When Just a Minute hits, it hits hard. Take a listen to this week's episode, especially the round about halfway in where Paul Merton is asked to talk about The Life of a Strawberry. It's a fluent flight of whimsey, always hewing close to the subject on the card. One for the year-end collection.

Back in 2022, this column wrote about Are You the One?, a couples show that was equally sweet and full of itself. This week, Eli Cugini published "Bisexual Season", about the American Are You the One? original, in particular a series that also asked difficult questions about gender identity and sexuality.

Why us? The trend of entertainers going into politics has not been an unqualified success; for every Volodymyr Zelenskyy (comedian) there's a Cicciolina (adult entertainer); for every Esther McVey (But First This! Presenter) there's a Tracy Brabin (But First This! presenter).

Now we hear that Linda Martin (sung the 1992 Eurovision winner) is considering a run for President of Ireland, and says she's been approached by "a political party" for the election later this year. Previous unsuccessful candidates for the position have included Dana Domestic (sung the 1970 Eurovision winner).

Pop the Question Cries of pain from the UKGS Irritated Pedantry Department as we watched this week's Popmaster TV. Questions managed to put spurious brackets in 1990s dance hit "The key: the secret", which shows factual accuracy was missing. They asked "What Five song was kept at number two by Westlife's 'Three times a lady'", as if any contestant would be able to reconstruct the exact chart show from 31 September 2000. And they asked an absolute chestnut of a question, "Who was lead singer with Tin Machine?", when the only thing anyone ever knew about Tin Machine was that they were a David Bowie side-project.

Popmaster says it wants to be seen as the University Challenge of pop music. This is a laudable goal; Popmaster needs to learn from UC, and ask interesting and unpredictable questions. We shouldn't hear the words "Jim's tune" and reach for our battered copy of the It's Immaterial hit. We shouldn't see "Heavy D and the Boyz" appear and predict "Third World". Popmaster needs to do better. Grump.

The very next day, we heard Vernon Kay. The prize on Ten to the Top is small, but nobody gets quite as excited as our Vern when someone is going for the maximum. Vernon has hosted more game shows than anyone we know, for the simple reason that he's very good at it. Ten questions, ten answers, sharp and precise and exact. It's no wonder that Ten to the Top is the nation's favourite pop quiz, and Popmaster – on telly and radio – is over a million behind.

Quizzy Mondays

Ah, that's why they delayed Robert Webb's week on House of Games (3) – a question asking for members of One Direction. The shows were originally scheduled to go out shortly after Liam Payne's death last autumn.

Aine McMenamin won Mastermind, taking the specialist subject of Taylor Swift. A high culture deconstruction of what some people see as a disposable singer, but these naysayers are wronger than someone very wrong indeed. We also appreciated the round on I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue; we listened to lots of episodes during the recent health emergency, but still did far worse than Dan Payne.

Crunchers booked their place in next week's Only Connect Third Place Play Off, crucially failing to identify Euripides heroines and confusing them with general Trojan women; they'd previously excelled at hidden Greek letters and this column's collection of songs in constructed languages. The match was won 21-18 by the Tea Totallers, who spotted musical riots, biological orders, and Ibsen plays. They'll be back for the Closing Ceremony Match against Four Opinions.

Warwick won an unsatisfactory episode of University Challenge, beating Queen's Belfast handsomely. The aggregate accuracy was low, just 45/108 between the teams, and both had more bonuses wrong than right. "Neither side has been strong on literature" claimed host Amol Rajan at the start; he neglected to point out Queen's strength in history or Warwick's perfection in philosophy. An incorrectly assessed penalty capped off a poor night: the buzz did not illuminate or sound before Rajan had shut up, so we'll take no points off.

Got the best song in the nation? It's Cân i Gymru (S4C, Fri). Only Connect has its all-important third place play off (BBC2, Mon), with the closing ceremony match to follow on 3 March. Countdown does its bit for equality, allowing a man to be the Vital Statistician; Dr. Tom Crawford, to be precise (C4, weekdays). House of Games (3) concludes its series with two Champions' Weeks, including one where Thursday shifts to Wednesday. Some rain must fall into every life, and One Person Found This Helpful (Radio 4, from 3 March) has been recommissioned as part of the network's campaign against comedy.

We plan to be back on 9 March, with a look at the Only Connect grand final, and possibly a slightly older show.

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