One of my favorite shows to premiere on The Food Network in recent years was "Chef" Robert Irvine's Dinner: Impossible, a "reality cooking" show in which the former British Royal Navy chef gets sent on a bunch of cooking missions at exotic locales, trying to create impossible meals in a short amount of time. There was the episode where they were cooking in some ice hotel in Canada for hundreds of guests and they needed to wear bulky equipment just to not freeze. There was an episode where Robert had to cook in the Mall in America for 1000 employees in like 6 hours while only using food and supplies that he could find within the Mall (and no grilling was allowed). There was the recent episode where Robert had to cook a gourmet meal for Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell and like 500 guests, all within a day and only using foods that were native to Pennsylvania. The show is awesome. Irvine is funny and brash and cooks highly original meals that the guests universally rave about (or at least the ones we see interviewed). The pressure is great to get the meals finished on time, but Robert and his co-chefs are always having a good time, and the episode when fellow Food Network star Guy Fieri takes on Robert at a kids camp is one of the most fun things the network has ever shown. Sadly, it is all about to come to an end. The Food Network has canceled the program after an investigation by the London Times showed that Irvine lied on his resume. Unbelievable.
The allegations I could find involved whether or not he has a culinary degree from Leeds University, as he claimed on his website apparently, whether or not he participated in making Charles and Di's wedding cake, and whether or not he ever cooked for U.S. presidents in the White House, a claim that is mentioned at the start of each episode. You can read the sordid details here and here. It doesn't look good. And Food Network decided to end the program, at least once the 4th season has completed filming. It was a shitty thing for him to do, if he was the one responsible for the lies. And maybe he needed to do it to get the show made. But at this point, does it really matter? It's a stupid reality show about food. Who cares if he didn't cook for the president? He was definitely in the Royal Navy and knows how to cook. What other "qualifications" are required? Can't we just move on and forget this happened, but keep the show on the air?
Food Network is obviously worried about bad publicity (does the network even get enough publicity to be worried about the bad kind?). Or perhaps they're genuinely pissed off at him for making them look bad. Or maybe they think viewers won't tune in once they know the details of the story. I guess that's all probably true and probably a reason for ending the program. But it's not like he was pumping HGH into the chickens, right? (HT Switsky). I mean, when a military guy gets fired for lying about cooking in the White House but there are no ramifications for those in the White House who lied about leading our military into an unnecessary war, isn't there something wrong with the world? As Bill Maher mentioned on his show last week, how come the U.S. Congress is concerned about whether Roger Clemens lied to them about what he shot in his ass, but they haven't done a damn thing to find out whether Alberto Gonzalez lied to them about the attorney firings scandal. I don't want to turn a Food Network post into another political diatribe, but fuck, something's missing here. Something's missing indeed. But hey, just go watch another episode of American Idol, America. And keep your eyes and ears shut to block out all the screaming. As for me, I'll lament the loss of one of my favorite shows in my own quiet way. I'll blog about it.
Should call this post Reading Impossible
Posted by: Rim Shot | March 05, 2008 at 01:18 PM
One of my wife's and I favorite shows.
Posted by: Got Squeezed by the Orange | March 13, 2008 at 08:31 AM