Cooking with Paris
Netflix
★☆☆☆☆
Fake or Fortune?
BBC1
★★★★☆
I have given this some careful thought and, nope, sorry, but I cannot think of a single good reason why anyone would want to watch Cooking with Paris. Yes, I realise that the “I’m so rich and privileged I don’t know what tongs are” schtick is the “brand” and is supposed to be as arch as a Roger Moore eyebrow. I get that Paris Hilton standing in a supermarket in a pink ball gown and sequinned mask asking a shelf-stacking member of staff, “This is chives?” is ostensibly her sending herself up. The fans are here for the wealth porn and all those silly white balloons because some people love all that. But aren’t they a little bored with it now? Isn’t Hilton, a member of the Hilton hotels family, monetising her pampered uselessness feeling a little dated?
Being given a Netflix cooking show for not really being able to cook and having to ask the film crew what a blender looks like is a classic example of “to those that have shall more be given”. Lest we hadn’t yet got the joke, tips for dumbos regularly came up on screen, such as: “Kitchens don’t clean themselves” and “Cooking tip: these are tongs”. She is laughing all the way to Coutts, or whatever bank US millionaires use, while the joke’s kind of on us. I suspect few people will agree with me, however.
She invited her old friend Kim Kardashian round and thankfully Kanye’s ex had removed all her blingy diamonds since there were quite enough hygiene hazards in this kitchen as it was, thank you. Hilton insisted on wearing fingerless lace gloves while handling food (ugh). I say “food”, but no one, not even the most E-number-addicted toddler would want to eat her sugar mountain with edible blue glitter. Try serving that in the Hilton. (I stayed in one quite recently and at breakfast they gave us fruit juice in cartons with a straw stuck on the side. I bet Paris has never had one of them.)
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I suspect that Hilton doesn’t eat this much sugar either, given her worked-out, slender figure. I heaved when in episode two the arm tassels on her leather cowboy jacket dangled in the uncooked batter. Saweetie, the American rapper, declared whatever gunk they had made to be so delicious “it feels like an orgasm”. I didn’t believe her. “Here’s to my flan,” Hilton said, which was presumably a euphemism. This, I’m afraid, will be a hit.
Fake or Fortune? risks bathos in every episode because the work of art it has just spent an hour obsessing over could be phoney. So it could have been a lot of primetime sound and fury signifying nothing. But that’s not true really because, as the saying goes, it’s not the destination but the journey. These are art history lessons by stealth and I’ve yet to watch a boring one.
Last night’s, centring on an 1850s painting Arab at Prayer, which the owner fervently believed to be by Jean-Léon Gérôme, was a cracker. There were nice twists, a bit of jeopardy — “I must say this is very damning” — and certain people being rude about its cultural “inaccuracies”. The suspense was built up beautifully. I won’t reveal the denouement in case you haven’t watched it yet, but it is a great watch and suggests that experts don’t know everything.
