There’s an interesting moment when Paul Hollywood is driving round Tokyo in a go-kart dressed as a Middle-aged Mutant Ninja Turtle in the company of Ladybeard, an Australian stuntman-turned-wrestler who looks like a hirsute Shirley Temple.
It comes in one of the themed restaurants they visit. Maybe it’s the one where they sit in a boat and have to catch their own lunch. Possibly it occurs when they recline the seats in the restaurant designed to replicate the first class dining in a jumbo jet.
Or maybe it happens in the Puppy Café, where the Liverpudlian master baker is mobbed by small dogs, and the extrovert Aussie grappler starts to shrink, due to his fear of canines. Actually, the thing happens throughout the show, but it’s underlined by the way the fellow called Ladybeard keeps referring to “Mr Hollywood”, almost as if the man who wears the name is a fictional character, a comic construction.
And, of course, he is. There’s something about television, and particularly food television, that turns ordinary people into cartoons. For Hollywood, his Bake Off persona is terse and judgemental, rationing his approval to infrequent handshakes.
Television shows in 2020
The actual Paul has suggested that this three-part food tourism documentary is more like the real him, though what this means in practice is that he plays up his status as a curious everyman in a variety of absurd contexts.
He struggles with chopsticks. He frets about the price of a pair of melons: £230. He stresses his love of a burger, a shake, a bucket of chicken. The bit where he seems to stop playing down to expectations occurs when he finally gets to visit a Japanese bakery, and indulges himself with a fruit scone (“smells like a scone”), some melon bread (“like a gloopy blitzed-up melon!”), and observes the 60-hour dough-making process of the anpan, which is like brioche with a red bean paste.
Broadly speaking, Mr Hollywood is an appealing confection, a tough-looking crust which folds into a soft centre. If you were to tweak the recipe, you might give it a more varied vocabulary to express the joy which can be found in well-made food, because “stunning” has to do a lot of work.
Still, there’s much to enjoy. This heightened, accelerated version of Tokyo is bright and appealing, and not just because it is full of urban energy in a way that seems glorious in the midst of our pandemic lockdown.
There’s a playful voiceover by Rebecca Front, adding a note of absurd fascination — a faint aftertaste of Eurotrash — to this fizzy concoction. And Hollywood seems to be enjoying himself as he samples delicacies such as tinned bread made for earthquake survivors (“a little bit chemical-y”) and deep-fried eel spine: “like a Michelin-starred pork scratching.”
Pot noodles? There are pot noodles. At Nakiryu, the budget-priced Michelin-starred ramen restaurant, the Japanese chef is invited to sample a British Pot Noodle.
The experiment is not a success.
Paul Hollywood Eats Japan is on Channel 4 tonight at 9pm
