MasterChef’s Final Season: A Culinary Catastrophe You Can’t Unsee

Hello everyone. Let’s talk about the culinary car crash masquerading as MasterChef’s latest series – the final bow for our dearly departed old guard, Gregg “I’m Not a Groper, Honest” Wallace and John “Racist Comment? Don’t Recall” Torode. Yes, even the title sequence probably needed a consent form and a diversity seminar before it hit air. What we got instead? An awkward stew of leftover footage, reheated, over-edited, and served cold with a side of shame.

The Ratings Flambé

Here’s the appetizer: viewership down from 2.73 million last year to just under 2 million this year. In some other universe, the BBC might be concerned about this sharp drop. But here in Terrestrial TV Land, they’ll tell you it’s all because people watch less TV in August. Right. Just like in gaming, when a company explains that a disastrous Steam chart drop is “seasonal fluctuation”. Sure it is. Keep telling yourselves that, chefs.

Context matters, of course. Last year was on a bank holiday, in April, earlier slot. This year — mid-August, prime time for nobody except wasps and repeat episodes of Bargain Hunt. But still, folks, this looks like your once-prized franchise just got nerfed into oblivion by its own devs.

Editing the Personality Out

The great tragedy here is the BBC’s defensive tactic: heavy editing to reduce the human footprint of its disgraced hosts. The result? According to critics, “no jokes” and “less chat” between the presenters and contestants. Imagine a co-op game where the devs patched out player voice chat entirely… then wondered why it felt dead inside. Comedy, personality, and human connection have been replaced by a grim conveyor belt of plated food. It’s like removing the seasoning from a dish and calling it “sensitive culinary practice.”

“The production team presumably being terrified that anything either of them says would be taken the wrong way.”

Well, if your main fear is that your presenters will blurt out something so toxic it could set off the building’s sprinklers, maybe – just maybe – you shouldn’t be airing the footage at all? Or here’s a thought, BBC: refilm? Kirsty Wark had the gall to suggest exactly that. Costly? Sure. But so is the reputational equivalent of food poisoning.

The Misconduct Menu

Let’s not dress this up with parsley. Wallace faced 83 complaints, over 40 upheld. That’s not “a bit of banter gone misunderstood” territory – that’s a full-blown emergency ward triage. Physical contact complaints, states of undress… somewhere between Carry On and a workplace safety horror story. Wallace says he’s “not a sex pest.” Which is a bit like a chef clarifying “this chicken is mostly cooked.” It doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.

Torode’s highlight reel? An allegation of a severely offensive racist term on set in 2018, met with a “no recollection” response – that Swiss cheese defence where memory suddenly springs holes on all the incriminating bits. Both gone, their replacements in queue, and yet here they were in the kitchen like ghosts who refuse to leave the lobby after rage quitting.

Serving Awkwardness on a Platter

So what remains is a weird ghost season: filmed before the scandal, broadcast after, where personality is surgically removed, flavour is gone, and the audience knows the backroom drama before the first soufflé rises. It’s like watching a speedrun where you already know the bug that’s going to softlock the game – you’re just grimacing until it happens. The “lacks pizzazz” criticism isn’t just apt – it’s generous. This isn’t just lacking seasoning; it feels like the fridge broke, the produce went bad, and the showrunner just shrugged and cooked it anyway.

Perhaps worst of all, the BBC’s justification? They wanted to “do right” by the chefs who took part. Noble, on paper. But in practice, it’s as if someone insisted on selling dodgy meat because they didn’t want to disappoint the farmer. There’s a point where the customer’s digestive system deserves consideration too, you know.

Final Diagnosis

As your resident pop culture doctor, my prescription for this patient: amputate the rotten limb rather than attempting to cauterize with re-edits. This version of MasterChef is in terminal decline, propped up by nostalgia and inertia. No amount of garnish will disguise that you’re serving a cold, overcooked finale from two chefs whose time in the kitchen should have ended before the scandal dessert trolley rolled out.

Final verdict: bad, underwhelming, and almost impressively joyless. MasterChef has gone from comfort food to something you pick at out of politeness — all while knowing the bad taste isn’t going away.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is entirely my opinion.

Fall in viewers for Wallace and Torode’s last MasterChef series, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1w83e44e21o