If, like me, you are a connoisseur of the finer things in life, your switches will be flicked by the following itemised listing:

1 – cooking approaching a professional standard 2 – human drama at its most intense 3 – witty repartee that would make Noel Coward blush

If you remain unaroused by these things, then I pity you. But if your cultural antennae is now twitching like a rabbit’s nostril, may I introduce to you ‘Close Up Masterchef Volume One’ – a magnified, photographic documentary of the eighth series of Masterchef (not counting the Loyd Grossman years, of course).

Whilst I’ve been a fan of Masterchef for some years now, early on in this series I felt a provocation I’d never experienced before – although the dropping of the auditions round initially felt like a mistake, it quickly became apparent that the quality of what was […]