Food Documentaries- The Rise of the Super Chef

Duration: 1 hour

Cooking is the new rock ‘n’ roll, or so we are told. Celebrity chefs are now some of the most famous people on TV and their cook books are among some of the best sellers every year. This programme focused on the rise of that lot, namely Gordon Ramsey, Delia Smith, Jamie Oliver, Nigella Lawson, Rick Stein, Antony Worrall Thompson - once described by Ramsey as a squashed Bee Gee - and Gary Rhodes.

The Rise of the Superchef promised a behind-the-scenes look at these world famous chefs and how they turned their cooking skills into vast multi-million-pound businesses and international brands.  Delia, Jamie, Gordon, Nigella, Rick, Gary and Antony - their names and faces are everywhere, they are all over the TV schedules, their own brand products dominate the department stores and their cookery books fill up the bestseller lists. We think we know them well, but for the first time this is the story of how they took British cuisine out of the joke book and into the record books.

One of the highlights of this documentary film is seeing a young, eager-to-please Gordon Ramsay in one of his earliest television outings. Back in those days he sounded like a softly-spoken minor Royal.

But it’s not just Gordon’s language that has changed since the legendary Delia Smith presented her first TV cookery show way back in 1973.

Restaurants have changed, the food we eat at home has changed, TV has changed, and bookshops are now bulging with celebrity recipe books.

Jamie Oliver’s last tome, to accompany his C4 series Ministry of Food, sold 542,000 copies in this country alone.

And chefs will typically earn far more from their book sales than they’ll be paid for presenting the series itself.

So exactly how did the superchefs transform British cuisine from an international joke into a mega-lucrative industry worth £300million?

Watch Young Gordon Ramsey being Polite on Screen

It wasn’t all bad though as we got to see Gary Rhode’s amazing yet daft spiked hair again but the best part was easily the first TV appearance of a young Gordon Ramsey “working ever so hard” doing an extremely polite and timid piece to camera. A far cry from his loud, sweary outbursts that pepper his career these days.

The age of the celebrity chef is a tedious period to live in, with the constant books and TV shows publicizing their food. Some, like Ramsey, do churn out some good entertainment but if their existence means that we have to put up with more shows like The Rise of the Superchef then surely they are one thing we can live without.

Learn why it is better to cook some type of food than to eat it raw. Learn why cooking our food created 'big human brains'? Watch this documentary film if you have time or you can bookmark it and come back later... Did the Discovery of Cooking Make Us Human?- Food Documentary