Best Home Cook: With Mary Berry and samosas on the menu, how could the recipe go wrong?

Britain’s Best Home Cook is what this programme was called when it was created in May 2018. Now Britain’s been deleted. Has the BBC become embarrassed about Britishness?

In her new book about insomnia, The Shapeless Unease, Remainer novelist Samantha Harvey bitterly inveighs against TV programmes with “Britain” or “British” in the title. Perhaps she is not alone in her indignation?

Maybe the BBC itself will soon become just the BC, if it survives? Or the shaming word could be replaced by another asserting quite the opposite of such brutish nationalism? Whatever, Best Home Cook is a show with one purpose only — somehow to make up for the loss of what was by far the BBC’s most popular programme, The Great British Bake Off (one of Harvey’s particular detestations), to Channel 4.

In that historic disaster, there was one vestige of hope. Mary Berry, queen of hearts, had decided to remain loyal to the corporation. So this knock-off format was hastily constructed around her, playing the ever more regal judge, her sparkle set off by blokeish chef Dan Doherty and fruit’n’veg man Chris Bavin as assistants.

Claudia Winkleman, the BBC’s most highly paid woman presenter, was appointed as compere to banter about her ignorance of cooking and, possibly, to judge by her withered appearance, of food altogether.

Hoping for the best, the Beeb has stuck as close as it dares to the Bake Off format, while optimistically importing elements of The Apprentice and even a touch of Big Brother. Ten contestants are banged up together in a big house and sent out each day to cook competitively in a studio kitchen.

First, they produce their “ultimate” version of some dish or other (tonight, family brunch); then, in the “rustle up”, they are challenged to make the most of a surprise ingredient (chocolate); finally, there’s a punishing “eliminator” round in which the weakest contestants are required to follow as best they can a precise recipe for a tricky dish (samosas).

Each week one of the hopefuls is then kicked out, amid hugs and tears. How could it fail? This show, though, proved too lazy a rehash of an over-familiar formula even for the under-critical and was not the uproarious success anticipated, scoring 2.9 million viewers for its first episode, whereas The Great British Bake Off steams on, averaging more than nine million on Channel 4.

Yet here comes (Britain’s) Best Home Cook again, for a second series, minimally adjusted. Doherty has been replaced as the cheffy judge by the knowledgeable and pleasingly stern Angela Hartnett, usefully reducing the laddishness at least.

Unlike the nasty psychos recruited for The Apprentice, the contestants here tend to the nice, even normal. All make a great show of supporting one another, although the camera also catches fleeting looks of disappointment, jealousy and triumph, as the judgments are made. Excerpts show us their home lives, to prove they have them. Berry serenely pronounces: “I never mind simplicity, provided it is absolutely perfect”. Me neither.

This week’s loser is ever so game. “It’s been a great experience, it’s a shame it’s come to an end but everything must.” Quite so. “One passes by the graveyard so often that sooner or later one falls into it” (Russian proverb). Few shows remind you so pertinently of that declension.

Best Home Cook is on BBC1, tonight at 8pm

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