Drop Marco: it's time to get 'Barred'

As celebrity chefs take over the autumn TV schedules, Adam Edwards comes up with his own twist on the reality gastro genre

This is the celebrity chef season and most of the small-screen cooks have now been plucked from their stoves to fatten up the autumn television schedules. The men and women in whites - in particular those we know by their Christian names (Jamie, Nigella and Gordon), those we speak of on a more formal basis (Raymond Blanc, Rick Stein, Antony Worrall Thompson) and the others that we find more of a mouthful (Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Heston Blumenthal) - are once again wearing pancake rather than cooking it.

So far the highlight has been Marco Pierre White in the reality show Hell's Kitchen. The old Michelin-starred philanderer spent two weeks bullying a lot of duff, TV-listing celebrities into producing the inedible for unspeakable showbiz friends and acquaintances.

Keats' season of mists and mellow fruitfulness metamorphosed into a fortnight of red mist and fruity language.

Sadly, despite the fact that Marco was the original bad boy of the kitchen, he mostly offered a re-gurgitation of everything else around, a sort of Gordon without the F-word. He was just another ham milking his vanilla crème brûlée in public.

What television needs is a new gastro idea. And my suggestion is a pub reality show called You're Barred.

The idea would be to turn a celebrity into a barmaid or barman. The show would be hosted by Coronation Street's Liz McDonald (actress Beverley Callard, who owns her own pub in real life), and the former owner of the Coach & Horses, Norman Balon, who was once known as London's rudest landlord.

Contestants with no experience of running a bar would be given a series of tests depending on their sex, skill and aptitude for the job.

So, for example, aspirant barmaids would get points for brilliance of peroxide, depth of cleavage, immediacy of heart-on-sleeve

sympathy and smartness of the quick put-down. Potential barmen would score for dullness of dress, feigned interest in customer's sporting knowledge, ability to change a barrel and speed in making a decent Bloody Mary.

Both sexes would get initiative points for the cleverest way to ignore a bolshie customer, for charging for bottled water when tap would do, for adeptness in avoiding health and safety laws and for the best straight face when telling a punter to put a cigarette out "because it will harm the bar staff" before sneaking around the back for a fag.

The highlight of the show, and the part that I suggest the television audience vote on, will be the skills with which a barmaid/man can, by the slowness of service, make a customer lose his or her temper. When the unsuspecting customer does see red the audience will shout out as one "You're barred!"

Bad manners at the bar

A creeping new greed is spreading across the rural pubs of England - the demand to keep a customer's credit card behind the bar after he has ordered his first drink, rather than presenting a bill at the end of the meal. Reports of this distrustful behaviour have reached me from pubs as far apart as Seaview in the Isle of Wight, to Coln St Aldwyns in the Cotswolds.

It is claimed that it is done for the convenience of both staff and customers. Actually, it is designed to a) stop customers doing a runner b) push punters into hanging on for a meal (it is embarrassing to tap in one's pin number for a five quid drinks bill) and c) sneaking in a service charge.

I feel the same way towards a licensee holding my plastic as I do to a hotel holding onto my passport. It is an ill-mannered act. Nowadays, if I am asked for my card after I have been served a pint I turn on my heel and leave, with an unpaid-for drink sitting on the bar.

Bring back George

Peppy the Fox's Glacier Mint polar bear is to be reunited with his friend Fox in a new series of the TV commercials starting this month. The news comes on the back of the re-emergence of the OXO family and the return last year of Captain Birds Eye.

This may be the time, therefore, for the beer industry to bring back the only advertising celebrity guaranteed to bring a tear to the eye of the most hardened boozer.

It is time to lobby the advertising regulators and all the other official killjoys to allow a return to the small screen of that greatest of all comedy entertainers of the last century - the Hofmeister bear.

touch of black stuff

Before we all get hooked on Guinness Red ("a smoother sweeter Guinness, which uses a lighter roasted barley") will the company please tell those of us addicted to its last smooth offering, where we can still buy it. Where - other than on eBay - is the nearest smear of Guinness Marmite to be had?