'It's wise of ITV to air Cooking With The Stars when no-one is watching'

You could not accuse the UK’s two main TV channels of failing to offer a feast of competitive entertainment on Tuesday night. On BBC One we had (most of) the excitement from Paris as Andy Murray tried to keep his last dance going for a few more steps and Great Britain's swimming team went for Gold in the men’s relay.

Meanwhile, over on ITV1? Well, we had Carol Vorderman and some bloke off YouTube attempting to make a Black Forest gateau FROM SCRATCH on Cooking With The Stars.

OK, so I was being mildly sarcastic in the opening paragraph of this review. Still, I guess you have to give ITV a little credit for at least bothering to offer something new to watch for those people who are not that fussed about wall-to-wall Olympics coverage. I mean, ITV could have just stuck a Harry Potter movie in the machine (again) and clocked off for the night (again).

Of course, the other way of looking at things is that ITV is fully aware that Cooking With The Stars is never going to be as big a hit as the Beeb’s Celebrity Masterchef, so they may as well slip it out while no one’s watching.

I suspect ITV is also fully aware that Cooking With The Stars would probably never have made it to this fourth series without all the money that its co-producer, food giant M&S, has clearly pumped into it.

To be fair, the M&S promotions and plugs don’t appear to be quite so blatant this series. If you listen very carefully though, you might still hear a tiny bit of co-hosts Emma Willis and Tom Allen’s souls dying as they add contractually-obligated words such as "and M&S asparagus" to the end of their sentences.

At one point I thought Allen had allowed his frustration at the M&S pimping to get the better of him as he declared, "This show is sponsored by M&S king cherries." Then I worked out he was simply referring to the size of the cherries.

Despite the general air of going through the motions, ITV did at least try to give it the big number again at the start of this latest run. We had all the usual in-your-face X Factor-style graphics about contestants not being able to stand the heat, and all the big talk about how it’s the most gruelling showbiz contest in the world.

Read more: Who's who in Cooking with the Stars?

At which point you could have forgiven the likes of Abbey Clancy and Pasha Kovalev if they’d said "You what? We did Strictly Come Dancing, mate. Have you not been reading the news?"

Allen even appeared to be hinting at a fresh twist this year as he suggested that none of the contestants could actually cook. I’m guessing he was joking — well, his day job is comedian — because it soon became fairly obvious that they weren’t complete novices and that, disappointingly, we weren’t going to see any comedy kitchen nightmares.

In Carol Vorderman’s case, "can’t cook" was actually softened to "has fallen out of love with cooking" — presumably to cover ITV should some internet sleuth subsequently uncover the secrets of Vorderman’s gourmet past.

Vorderman also revealed that her current go-to snack is a packet of sprouts, which no doubt provided an easy "Is that why she’s such a massive windbag these days?" tap-in for her political opponents.

Abbey Clancy was perfectly happy to play up to the disasterchef angle though. She had even furnished the producers with a home video of her burning her ex-footballer husband Peter Crouch’s dinner. Incidentally, said video offered further clues as to what supermodel Clancey saw in the gawky beanpole striker. He can reach smoke alarms without a stepladder.

Vorderman and Clancey were up first in this opening episode, taking part in a dinner party menu battle. This was billed as a contest between "simplicity and ambition", which I thought was a little harsh until I realised it was actually a reference to their dishes — steak and chunky chips for Clancey, salmon coulibiac with green beans in a Champagne reduction, for Vorderman

Simplicity won easily, which left Vorderman facing more screen time — sorry, I mean facing the dreaded Cook-Off. That placed her head-to-head with an affable young man called Harry Pinero who had earlier introduced himself with the words: "People know me for being a content creator and presenter."

I must admit that left me ruing the fact that I had not updated my "content creator" and "presenter" files in a while. However, the fact that Pinero was the only contestant that I had not heard of meant that Cooking With The Stars had a better celebrity strike rate than certain other shows I could mention. (Speaking of which, if that leaked Strictly line up is the real one the viewers could be in for an even rougher ride than the celebrities this year.)

Sadly, it also meant that Pinero was always going to be up against it. In the eliminator round he was charged with cooking an elaborate duck dish while vegan Pasha Kovalev, who had earlier been outed by his wife Rachel Riley for not being "the fastest chopper in the West", was tasked with, erm, adding some spices to a cauliflower.

Then in the Cook-Off, Pinero was slightly hamstrung by the fact that he’d never heard of Black Forest gateau. The much more famous Vorderman duly triumphed in their dessert war, which means she lives to cook another day.

Sorry, I mean she lives to fall back in love with cooking another day.

(P.S. RE the news that next week’s task is Cooking On A Budget. Don’t tell me M&S has pulled the funding already.)

Cooking With The Stars is streaming on ITVX, and airs weekly on Tuesday evenings on ITV1.

This article originally appeared on Yahoo TV UK at https://uk.news.yahoo.com/itv-cooking-with-the-stars-no-one-watching-094627390.html