Has Nigella lost her bite? Just 1.3m see her new cookery show on Channel 4

Nigella's bite appears to have been muzzled. The first programme of Nigella Lawson's heavily trailed new cookery show attracted only 1.3 million viewers, unofficial figures indicated yesterday.

The new show, Forever Summer, on Channel 4, fell well short of the 2.1 million that watched her Christmas show and pointed to further evidence of growing viewer fatigue with celebrity cook programmes.

The show, which attracted only about one in 20 viewers, appears to have suffered against the scheduling of ITV1's I'm A Celebrity ... Get Me Out Of Here!" and drew fewer than half of the number who watched a BBC2 documentary about a submarine journey to the bottom of the sea shown at the same time.

Despite the disappointing viewing figures for Forever Summer, which was beginning an eight-week autumn run, the BBC's challenger Rick Stein attracted 2.4 million people to his programme in a slot half an hour earlier on BBC2. It included features on meeting pigs on the Isle of Wight and tasting cider in Somerset. Although Lawson once complained that she felt like committing suicide when she was described as a celebrity chef, the programme is accompanied by another book, her fourth. The book market is also in danger of being saturated with new books written by Rick Stein, Delia Smith, Jamie Oliver and Gary Rhodes.

Earlier this year, Lawson and her fellow celebrity cooking personalities were ignored by the organisers of the Glenfiddich Food and Drink Award, who declined to present a television award for 2001.

The organisers said that no programme had met the criteria for "inspiration, education and entertainment", although some critics accused them of food snobbery.