Let's be careful what we do now with Gordon Ramsay, because it is we who made him. We, the consumers as much as the creators of the Gordon Ramsay product, made this monstrous, embarrassing, foul-mouthed, only half-true media behemoth out of a decent man who happened to be good at cooking, and now that it looks like the wheels are coming off, I think it behoves us to tread carefully, and not just cast him into the pit, dust off our hands, and move on to Heston or Marco or whichever other pan-juggler we want to fatten into a global megabrand and then slaughter.
When I saw the crass and ungentlemanly things Gordon had said about the Australian television presenter Tracy Grimshaw at a Melbourne food fair and the grotesquely unhilarious mock-up of her as a naked pig, I was flabbergasted.
“Gordon's such a prick!” I shouted, hurling the paper across the table. “His restaurants are in trouble, his viewing figures have gone rotten, he's been busted serving ready meals, and now he's made himself look a proper nasty little grunt. The whole Gordon Ramsay phenomenon is crumbling about his ears, and he deserves everything he gets.”
And then I thought, “Hang on, Gordon's my friend. He has never been anything but supportive and sweet to me, apart from occasionally ribbing me about being shorter than him; he gave me my first break on television and is always charming to my girlfriend. I don't hope he fails at all. I just hope he changes.”
But if I can think such ungracious thoughts, even briefly, about a man I personally like very much, then I can only imagine what everybody else must be thinking. For the world has simply turned on him. In his time of relative strife this past year the lack of public sympathy has been quite staggering. And that is because he is a big, sweary, confident macho man, and we assume he can handle it.
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Except that Gordon isn't like that at all. The Gordon you see on television has been created artificially. In reality, Gordon is a shy, nervous man, not by nature a big public personality. And if you are not naturally a big personality - as Jonathan Ross is, for example, or Barack Obama - then to get anywhere in television you have to pretend to be. And that is Gordon's problem.
In the kitchen, he is king. He is a brilliant chef who inspires loyalty because of his demonstrable skill. He is also big and handsome, so people want to follow him. And that's it. That is why the early series of Kitchen Nightmares made such compulsive viewing. Point a camera at Gordon when he is working, in his element, full of confidence that here, now, is the only place he ought to be, and the results are electric. But ask him to talk into a lens about some duff item dreamt up by researchers to help sell books and kitchenware, and you get, well, Gordon Ramsay's F-Word. And that's on a good day. On a bad day, you get what happened in Melbourne.
Gordon shouts and swears on the television and fondles actresses and says ungallant things not because he is a bad person or a thicko or a bully, but because he doesn't know what else to do.
Gordon does not have great self-confidence. He worries that other people are cleverer than him, funnier than him, sharper than him (which they aren't necessarily) and so on screen he swears a lot and is rude and does that weird thing of ending every sentence with an interrogative “yes?”. And that is what you see. And that is what you loved. But it is a mirage, as fragile as a familiar shape momentarily picked out in a cloud.
I was involved with the first series of The F-Word right from the early pre-production period, mostly, I think, thanks to Gordon. As we prepared to film the original, superexpensive and totally disastrous pilot episode, Gordon was a wreck. He was supposed to come dancing down the stairs like Bruce Forsyth and launch into a Jay Leno-ish stand-up routine. But he was crippled by stage fright. He was just pacing up and down the corridor saying, “I'm f***ing cr***ing myself, I'm f***ing cr***ing myself...” It was a disaster. He couldn't remember the gags - which were terrible anyway - and he hated having a concealed receiver in his ear with a producer telling him what to do and where to stand and what to say.
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The show that eventually came to air was very different - the vast audience and scripted comedy banished - but even then, Gordon was freaked out. He was supposed to come down the stairs into the dining room and say to the diners, “Hello and welcome to The F-word!” but he just couldn't do it. Couldn't face it. Too shy. And in the end they compromised, and he would come down and the audience would all clap, and then he'd go off to a quiet room and do his “Hello and welcome” alone to the camera.
You must have seen him on prime-time chat shows, wishing he was anywhere but there, almost speechless with nerves, giggling like a school girl at the presenter's gags, knowing that he cannot compete.
People often call Gordon a bully. But he is quite the opposite. Gordon is a victim. He is the kid who swears and shouts and takes the mickey so that nobody will notice how vulnerable he is.
He's standing there in Melbourne, unslept, harassed, doing the bidding of the unseen forces that muster around him, hardly aware what town or day it is, trying to break into yet another country to promote books written for him by somebody else and restaurants whose kitchens he'll never see, and he's expected to say something funny. So up comes a photo of a pig with a woman's face and he says: “That's Tracy Grimshaw ... holy crap, she needs to see Simon Cowell's Botox doctor.” But he'd never say such things normally. Not in the real world. Not in the kitchen. Not away from the cameras and all his fluffers and tweeters.
I really hope it does not all go pear-shaped now for Gordon. I hope that long before it is too late he takes a break, has a think about what to do next and makes some decisions for himself. And then at least, if it all goes wrong, it will go wrong on his terms, and nobody else's.