Next Level Chef; The Reunion; No Place Like Home

“Next Level Chef is a breathless, bewildering gabble of a show. This is a cookery contest that is so obsessed with contrived competition that it almost completely forgets about food. If the point of reality cookery is to find talent and inject it into the UK food scene, you do wonder how useful success in this steampunk Ready Steady Cook is likely to be.”
Jack Seale, The Guardian

“Ostensibly, this is a British version of a hit American format, yet it has inherited all the bombastic US feel. You watch exhausted by the nutritionally void bombast, by the cynicism of a ‘here you go, masses’ format, and with the feeling that it is our patriotic duty to resist the transatlantic march of ultra-massive, American-styled TV at all costs.”
James Jackson, The Times

“Next Level Chef is awful. I’m sure Gordon Ramsay would say that he hates laziness, but this is one of the laziest shows I’ve seen. It takes bits of every other cookery show on TV, gives it a hint of The X Factor and expects us to be impressed by the fact it has a pointlessly expensive set.”
Anita Singh, The Telegraph

“The concept was daft with a side-serving of baffling. Daft can of course work on television – just look at Taskmaster’s success – but the problem with Next Level Chef was that there were far too many moving parts. In the end, former chef Kelly triumphed in the fry-off against home cook Tia. But rather than happy or sad, both seemed bewildered. Viewers may have felt likewise at the end of an hour of food-based telly that was completely out to lunch.”
Ed Power, The i

“The set for Gordon Ramsay’s ‘toughest cooking competition ever’ is like a multi-storey car park — with kitchens stacked in three badly lit layers. The place looks like it smells dank. And I wouldn’t fancy eating anything that had been in the lift.”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail

“It could have been The Secret History via A Place in the Sun. What comes out in the wash, however, is a frothy potboiler so highly strung that the only way to endure it – and sticking with it is a feat of endurance – is to marvel at the sheer ludicrousness of each unlikely twist.”
Rebecca Nicholson, The Guardian

“In the following episodes we encounter a homicidal doctor, Russian gangsters, a bunch of crazed feminists yelling about the patriarchy, and some Sapphic snogging (well, it is French). One minute there are perfect blue skies over Cap d’Antibes, the next there are blizzard conditions. It’s quite mad. After a while, you will almost start to enjoy how rubbish it is.”
Anita Singh, The Telegraph

“With such a lot of buried history to uncover, this show could have concentrated more on Victoria Derbyshire’s family and included fewer frivolous items, such as her first taste of black pudding at Bury market. The real surprise is how effective a stroll around familiar streets can be at stirring the emotions. This series is starting to look really promising.”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail