This was published 9 years ago
What's on TV Monday: My Kitchen Rules returns to slice and dice with raw emotion
By Ben Pobjie
"Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look," said Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, in what scholars believe to have been history's first satirical reference to Pete Evans.
As the new season of My Kitchen Rules (Seven, 7.30pm) kicks off, the increasingly bronzed and bony Evans is back to stalk the dining rooms of the nation, eyes bulging startlingly out of his skull, looking ready to tear out the throat of the first person to try to make him eat cheese. By his side is the sleek Manu Feildel, who is still doing that accent he does to try to fool people into thinking he's French.
Robert and Lynzey feature in the 2015 season of Channel Seven's My Kitchen Rules.
It's a colourful bunch on this year's MKR, and by "colourful", I mean "under the impression they are much better cooks than they really are". The first instant restaurant of 2015 belongs to Jac and Shaz, who can't believe that "two chicks from Mount Isa" are on the show; a sentiment I never really understand. Everyone has to come from somewhere, and even Mount Isa is not immune to the seductive allure of MKR. They're using the meal to pay tribute to the mining industry, which is bound to give anyone an appetite. However, there's ominous signs from the start when it's revealed they're using sugar in the dessert, which may cause Pete to have some kind of paleo-seizure.
In the early rounds, each instant restaurant is judged by the other contestants, which obviously produces an incredibly fair and impartial process. Jac and Shaz's advantage is that as first cabs off the rank, their opponents will only be voting based on strategy, and not on deep personal dislike. And there'll be a lot of that around this season, with teams like Ash and Camilla, who call Melbourne "the Paris of the south" and say things like "our social calendar is absolutely packed". With amazing efficiency, Ash and Camilla take only about 30 seconds to let us know that we'll be hating them passionately for the entire season. Unless it turns out we hate Annie more, given that she's the sort of person who calls herself "quirky".
Much more likeable is Robert, a Texan who moved to the Blue Mountains after completing his mission of tracking down the Wild Bunch. But what all the contestants have in common is that they're deluded enough to believe they have a future in the food industry. And when it comes down to it, it's the food that matters. Haha, just kidding.
If you're not into lamb and schadenfreude, there's always How Big Is The Universe? (SBS1, 7.30pm), in which astronomers and physicists probe the outer reaches of the cosmos to map the limits of space and time in unprecedented detail, reveal the secrets of existence, and make us all feel pretty insignificant, especially given that we're wasting our lives watching reality TV.