How to win MasterChef? Serve delicious sound bites… CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews last night’s TV

Famous Master Chef

Judgement:

Your brain

Judgement:

Eating people is wrong, as Michael Flanders and Donald Swann reminded us in their tune about an unwilling cannibal.

Few people under 50 remember those devilishly smart singers in their tuxedos. But a young generation of foodies is ready to give human flesh a try, as Gregg Wallace proved last week in a Channel 4 spoof documentary.

Visitors to London’s trendy Borough Market stuffed diced steak on cocktail sticks to Britain’s Miracle Meat and agreed it was delicious after being told it was lab-grown from human tissue cells (a Ch4 publicist assures me it was real beef).

Gregg didn’t try the same trick on one of the nervous amateur chefs when Celebrity Masterchef (BBC1) returned. But Love Island’s Dani Dyer was shocked to discover that the mystery ingredient for her first dish was venison.

“Baby deer,” she wailed. “You can’t eat Bambi.”

That turned out to be possible, with baked potatoes and a dollop of pesto that she whizzed in the blender. The venison also looked expertly cooked, cooked on the outside and red in the centre. Since she claimed she’d never cooked it before, a cynic could almost wonder if the celebs are getting a little off-camera secret coaching.

The essential skill in this show is not culinary, but quote-worthy. What the judges are really looking for are delicious sound bites.

Former InBetweeners actor James Buckley is now a YouTube personality who “documents” his family life online and he knew how to play the game. To control his nerves, he told himself, “I won’t go to jail if I do badly.”

Dani understood too. “That was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life,” she gasped after the first round.

Stand-up comedian Marcus Brigstocke proved to be the most confident cook, but he won’t get much further in the competition if he doesn’t learn how to serve over-emotional asides.

He told Gregg that he never uses sugar in his recipes, but offered no explanation. I had to scroll through Marcus’ previous interviews: he revealed ten years ago that sugar gives him mood swings.

That was a missed golden opportunity. He could have touched our hearts with tearful tales of the day he drank a mug of tea with milk and three lumps. After all, this isn’t just MasterChef. It’s Celebrity MasterChef.

Neuroscientist Professor Heather Berlin spread sound bites like sugar cubes as she explored the differences between our perceptions and reality in the first of a two-part documentary, Your Brain (PBS America).

“There are more connections in your brain than there are stars in the galaxy,” she explained. ‘We literally walk around with about 10,000 galaxies of neuron connections.’

Ten Thousand Galaxys sounds like a lot of chocolate, not to mention sugar, but I misunderstood – and that, Professor Heather said, is the whole problem. Reality exists outside of us and our brains are locked up in our skulls. No wonder they often get things wrong.

To prove it, she cited that famous dress that half the internet insisted was blue with black trim. The other half saw a white dress with gold trim.

The controversy, she said, was caused by the way our brains interpret color, specifically the way color looks different under natural or artificial light.

Then she settled the argument by producing the dress herself. It was absolutely blue and black, for her eyes and mine. On the other side she was inside, under electric light. If you still think it’s white and gold, don’t sign up to complain.