From time to time, a TV show comes along which is so thrillingly original, so wildly imaginative, that you can’t even begin to think where the makers got the idea. Britain’s Best Home Cook (BBC1, Thursday) isn’t one of them. Nevertheless, it has a serious claim to being the most important new programme of the week — if only to the BBC which, despite the failure of The Big Family Cooking Showdown (whose title I just had to check via Google), clearly hasn’t given up on the possibility of finding a way to replace The Great British Bake Off.
But in fact there’s another series that some viewers might feel is lurking in the background here — and that’s W1A. For the past few months, BBC pods have presumably been full of BBC bods discussing how much Britain’s Best Home Cook should stick to the conventional formula and how much it should ‘refresh’ it.
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