Jamie’s Quick and Easy Food: Jamie Oliver is back in the kitchen with genuine enthusiasm and inspiring new dishes

In all the noise about his failing restaurant chain, his mission to ban unhealthy food from schools and whether everything actually is pukka, it’s easy to forget that Jamie Oliver started out as a chef.

But here he is, The Naked Chef back in the kitchen (well, a kitchen designed to look like it is in his family home, with pictures pinned on the fridge, a thriving basil plant and mugs hanging over a sink so big that it looks more like a bathtub).

He wants to show the great British public how to make quick and easy food that’s still delicious “because when life’s crazy busy that’s all I crave”.

Each recipe has just five ingredients (Oliver hammers this home by repeatedly saying “five”, in breaks, with his fingers fanned out to count to that number like he’s in a music video).

Cynics will gripe about how the ingredients are too posh. Oliver claims you can get clams from the supermarket — maybe where he lives but not at the Tesco on Stroud Green Road.

He recommends cannellini beans from a can with stock and claims that stem ginger is an essential. And this quick-meals thing doesn’t take the washing-up time into account.

But it has become too basic to be snide about Oliver and his irritating enthusiasm. It is high energy — Soul II Soul’s Back to Life plays throughout, with Oliver clicking his fingers when the music stops. Ingredients tumble across the screen — with bouncing lemons, spinning scallops and beans tossed high in a sieve.

Oliver seems genuinely pumped to be sharing the food that has changed his life and is going to take the stress out of yours too.

He crouches down to watch his clams “popping open”, as rapt as if he were watching a thriller.

Everything is “sumptuous, gorgeous, lovely, ohwwwrrr yes”. You have to admit that it does look nice (as does the glass of rosé wine for the vongole sauce that Oliver takes a sip of while cooking).

These aren’t dishes that I would pick to cook on a busy weeknight — flaky pastry pesto chicken and spicy ’nduja vongole sound too ambitious; why would you bother wrapping your chicken in what’s essentially a croissant? It’s unnecessary effort.

That’s before you get to his suggestion to make a watermelon granita for dessert, or edible snow as he romantically calls it (at least it’s healthy).

But by the end I was won over. This programme is about getting out of a rut and seeing him prepare inspiring new dishes, and it works.

If you watch until the end you will be rewarded by a sweet scene where two mini-Olivers (Buddy Bear and Petal) pad in, fresh from the bath, because they’ve heard there’s a watermelon granita being prepared. No one explains why they are wearing wellington boots and Crocs with their pyjamas.

The children have inherited their father’s joie de vivre, saying if they had three hands they would put three thumbs up.

Meal times chez Oliver must be pukka. If I tried harder with my weeknight dinners could I be that happy too? Maybe I’ll try to find some clams for Oliver’s vongole this week.

Jamie Oliver's Quick and Easy Food, Channel 4, 8pm.