Flirty food for thought

TV Review:It's been a chocolate-chip-and-chlamydia kind of week, with a silk-sheathed Nigella Lawson providing the corseted highs and lows.

From the irritating burn of the raven-haired sugar dumpling hotly rubbing herself against her pantry shelf, to the hilarity she unwittingly produced while pretending to be an ordinary old housewife getting to grips with the ironing (what's a hard-working girl to do when inspiration fails her? Oh I know, spruce up Saatchi's shirts!), Nigella Express is an amuse-bouche and a half, its presenter a generously heaped spoonful of kitchen kitten liberally sprinkled over a great big dollop of pantomimic self-parody.

"I can slurp as I work," said the carefully constructed Careworn Nigella, slumped over her gleaming Le Creuset pot with her coat on, spooning lamb bolognaise (infused with "nursery sweetness") straight from the bubbling pot into her willing mouth.

"My husband is appalled by such slovenliness," she purringly lied, kicking off her peep-toes. "My noodle soup is the perfect . . . tension-tamer," she then growled, sweetly undulating out of her little mint-green cardie.

This is not a cookery programme; this is domestic-goddess-turned-jack-in-the-box-of-Viagra starring in Carry On Up The Culinary. The insatiable silver-spoon-licker promised "an express route to deep . . . deep comfort", and while that may be an interesting offer, Nigella, it does not stop one from expecting Kenneth Williams to stick his head out of a vol-au-vent and say "ooohhh, get her".

All to be taken with a pinch of salt, obviously, although it is worth pointing out that when Nigella (roughing it in a denim jacket) trips into her kitchen and ignites the fairy lights, before creating her lasciviously molten chocolate cookies to comfort her lovesick friend, she is in fact tripping on to a TV set and her "mate" is a special extra on a BBC settee. Fine and dandy - we are, after all, just watching a steamy kitchen-sink drama in which Ms Lawson gets to play the vixen and the mother hen.

The question is: how far would it be advisable for the programme-makers to push this sticky envelope? The woman looked a tad more deranged than desirable when, halfway through her midweek slot, the studio lights were dimmed and we were invited to partake in the fantasy of a sleepless Nigella (tormented, no doubt, by an unassuaged need to have something inside her) getting up in the middle of the night and slinking into her pantry (her "comfort capsule" as she calls it) to relieve her appetite with half a dozen free-range eggs, a small bottle of vanilla essence and a bag of icing sugar. It was supposed to be 2am, for Christ's sake!

Later, strawberry coulis splattering her black silk dressing gown, and eggy bread lying in a spent heap (having been soundly flayed with caster sugar), she invited us to rejoin her next week to "cook our way to instant karma". I don't know, Nigella, I think I'd find that particular prospect even more alarming than coming up to see your etchings.

NO SOONER, IT seemed, had Nigella switched out the lights on her funky studio home (and had the chauffeur drive her back to Belgravia for a frosty Bolly) than The Restaurant, that heart-stopping, pulse-racing contest, began to draw to a close, with Raymond "let-me-feeel-your-passssion" Blanc finally choosing the series winner from this highly entertaining programme.

In late summer Raymond Blanc ("the little Frenchman", as he calls himself) took on nine couples, wannabe restaurateurs, and each week, a la The Apprentice, the couples were set edge-of-the-seat challenges (such as, "Who hid the halal, I've a table-load of hungry Muslims?" Or, "What do you do with a bevy of rugger buggers and a cold kipper?"). Blanc, like Alan Sugar (the little Englishman), is a self-made individual from humble beginnings who ascended, in this case, to a firmament of Michelin stars. However, unlike Sugar, whose modus operandi appears to be crushing nihilism, Blanc genuinely seems to encourage the perspiring human wreckages in his charge, a quality which gave the programme an emotional charge.

My favourite contestants were a northern English prison caterer, Martin, and his wife, Emma, a big-hearted bingo caller, both of whom resembled large and generous toddlers, but their childlike steak-and-kidney sensibilities were soon eclipsed. Blanc eventually opted to go into business with Jeremy, a crabby former marine chef with a weeping wife, Jane, and the leadership qualities of Mr Plod (but okay, okay, the man could cook). In the final programme, Jeremy and Jane went head to head with identical twin sisters Jess and Laura in Blanc's home town of Besançon, where they cooked for his diminutive mother and where the twins' symbiotic whole-food symphony was soundly flattened by the winning couple's highly strung precocity. Game over.

AS ONE DOOR closed, however, the singed gate of Dragon's Den creaked open . . . For the uninitiated, Dragon's Den is where a bunch of entrepreneurs try to sell their often ludicrous ideas to a panel of industry captains in an effort to get the impatient millionaires to invest their own money in the candidates' futures. It is, of course, less interesting when an efficient, well-presented proposal is pitched, but howlingly enjoyable, in a meanderingly cruel sort of way, to watch mind-bogglingly useless inventions (furry acrylic birthing balls, anyone?) being ineptly explained by their creators, before being pulped by the humourless and unsentimental masters of mammon.

Programme one of the new series was a prime example of the form, bringing us right back to where we started: food and sex. Enter the dragon's den a porous, shiny, six-foot bloke under the halo of a puce mohican, wearing a hairy sporran and a mini-kilt. Clutching a brown paper bag of home-made beef jerky, he and his girlfriend (a goth to his jock) asked the panel for a hundred grand to expand their kitchen industry. For what? Why would the world need this man's beef jerky? He was wearing woollen kneesocks and his temples were weeping. I'd rather invest in a chocolate teapot, said Peter "I'm a seriously good-looking guy" Jones, distaste corrupting his supposed perfection.

Chocolate teapot? Nigella, I can see a gap in the market - a melt-in-the-mouth surprise for frothy insomniacs? You go, girl.

BILLBOARDS THE SIZE of substantial principalities, adorned with the reassuringly conservative faces of TV doctors Cathy Costello and Dan Woodhouse, have been proliferating around my neck of the woods like an opportunistic infection these last few weeks, announcing the return of RTÉ's unarguably popular medical drama, The Clinic.

Now in its fifth season, the series has, over the years, garnered a large Sunday night audience, which was treated this week to tales of chlamydia, infertility and semen analysis, along with a further chance to observe the interestingly sterile ongoing domestic relationship between the drama's central characters, the taciturn Woodhouse (Dominic Mafham) and the, em, taciturn Costello (Aisling O'Sullivan).

The Clinic is a strangely empty institution buttressed by strong actors; the leafy multidisciplinary Dublin 4 practice is staffed by a genuinely excellent cast who, at this stage, probably know their characters like the back of their surgical gloves. The problem with the series is that the potential of the storylines and the flexibility of the performers are rarely set free from formulaic traps, and while one can happily, even gratefully, sit in front of it for an hour at the end of a crucifyingly exhausting weekend of cheap wine and under-11 football tournaments, by the time you stand up to find the lunchboxes you are quite likely to have forgotten the entire episode.

From my copious notes, however, which I use to paper over the cracks in my increasingly delinquent memory, I can tell you that Cathy, who would appear (rather bravely, in television terms) to have been functioning with a low-lying depression since breaking up with her husband Ed many long seasons ago, is now pregnant by Dan; while Dan, no longer the insufferable boor he once was, gets to hang out in a bath-towel in Cathy's cool flat. Dan, having undergone major surgery himself at the close of last season, was at sixes and sevens this week about wielding a scalpel again, but Cathy, with the unflinching self-possession more usually found underneath a guardsman's busby, told Dan to pull up his scrubs - and he did, not a bother, jobs oxo, ep over, no need for hysterics (although a bit of tension mightn't have gone amiss).

Later, watching the couple chat happily about the quality of his incisions, I decided that I too would take a leaf out of the scriptwriter's book and resolve to be resolute. I am going to jettison hysterical ineptitude and analytical torpor, I am going to stop watching reality TV and attempt a Booker winner instead. Okay, that's that sorted. Good. It's just . . . The X Factor live shows kick in on Saturday and I can already feel my Pavlovian posterior heading towards the chair.