Too many cooks?

Once, they were surefire ratings-winners. Now, TV chefs such as Jamie and Delia are losing viewers. And as the appetite for cookery wanes, TV bosses are desperate for a new recipe. Meg Carter reports

Extra helpings of TV cookery shows are proving increasingly hard to swallow, if the falling ratings are anything to go by. With established purveyors of the televisual culinary arts – from Ainsley Harriott to Delia Smith – apparently losing their charms, the question is: can new formulas revitalise TV cooking programmes, or will television commissioners opt for fewer celebrity chefs?

The first inklings that the tide might be turning for TV cookery came with the latest outings by Delia, Gary Rhodes and Jamie Oliver. All suffered a significant decline in viewer numbers from previous series. In the case of Delia's How to Cook: part three, one million viewers were lost between the first and final programme in the series, while the series itself attracted a million fewer viewers than the last.

The next came with last month's Glenfiddich Food and Drink awards, when the jury decided not to give an award in the TV category this year. Why? "Because it was felt there was simply nothing that met our criteria for inspiration, education and entertainment," a spokesperson sniffily explained. Since then, production circles have been buzzing with talk that BBC2 – the channel that has done more than any other to highlight the culinary art – is reviewing its culinary TV commitments.

"For quite some time, commissioners have said, don't bother sending us any more cookery shows – they already had their Ready Steady Cooks and Jamie Olivers," says Jill Lourie, director of broadcast at Twofour Productions, an independent company whose credits include Kids Eat for the late Carlton Food Network and Taste for Channel 4. "The trouble is that many shows now feel they've been around for a while – and there's a real need now for fresh faces and new ideas," she says.

After a long period of time when television appeared to be resisting that logic, the penny has finally dropped. Having spotted a potential new face, Twofour is currently developing a new show for Discovery Europe featuring Heston Blumenthal, the chef/owner of The Fat Duck, the Michelin-starred Restaurant of the Year for 2001.

Yet it is, perhaps, hardly surprising that a number of leading TV cookery programmes seem to be falling out of fashion. In recent years they've become 10 a penny.

Not so long ago a channel would stick to just one or two star chefs in residence – a Fanny Cradock or Graham Kerr, perhaps, and maybe a specialist, such as Madhur Jaffrey – serving up a simple "how to" approach. With the Nineties, however, came an explosion of lifestyle TV formats and with it the cookery quiz show, typified by the still-popular Ready Steady Cook and a range of spin-off formats.

"The whole genre really began with personalities. Then came the travelogue in the early days of Channel 4 with Carluccio and Gary Rhodes on the road. When Ready Steady Cook proved that cooking could be taken out of the kitchen and in front of a studio audience, it moved into more mainstream entertainment," says Pat Llewellyn, creative director of Optomen Television whose credits include Two Fat Ladies and The Naked Chef.

"Two Fat Ladies broke the mould with its narrative style. Then Jamie's shows marked a different way of showing food and a fresh spirit that makes cooking accessible to younger viewers. But viewing figures across the board are down at the moment – a combination of too many too similar ideas and the same old faces."

Undoubtedly audiences are now spoilt for choice. But BBC 2's controller, Jane Root, is quick to stress that reports that cooking on her channel has gone off the boil are premature. Cookery is just one of a number of areas currently "under review", she confirms, along with history, sitcoms and snooker. "But that's because TV is always about reinvention. The British TV audience has really taken food to its heart, and there's still a tremendous appetite for related programming to be filled."

She concedes that a number of shows have not performed as well recently as earlier series did, but BBC 2 places the blame for that on viewers' tendency to tire more quickly of programme formats and the impact of Coronation Street now being shown in competition with its traditional Tuesday-night cooking slot.

Unperturbed, Root is reassessing the scheduling and the range of cookery-related shows she wants to see. She is encouraged by the performance of last year's Friends for Dinner, in which members of the public were given a culinary makeover by a celebrity chef to cook dinner for friends. And she praises a more recent success for the channel, Food Junkies – a documentary series screened at 9pm that attracted a more than respectable audience of 3.5 million.

"We're now focusing on what to do next with a number of people we regularly work with, in particular Gary Rhodes and Delia Smith, who until earlier this month has been more focused on whether Norwich City would get into the Premiership than much else," Root adds. "In Delia's case, we all knew that How to Cook would only ever be a trilogy. Now that's over, the big question is what we do with her next."

The results of Root's efforts to spice up BBC 2's cookery fare will appear on screen in coming months. Recently making its debut was The Best, a new format in which the up-and-coming TV chefs Paul Merrett, Silvana Franco and Ben Donoghue serve variations of the same meal theme to three members of the public, who nominate the best dish from the dining-room upstairs.

This autumn a new cookery double act, Tony & Giorgio, arrives at BBC 2, and another major new cookery format will launch on air next year. Innovation, meanwhile, is already evident elsewhere. Lourie points to the beginning of a blurring of cookery with other programme genres. Earlier this month, Channel 4 launched Treats from the Edwardian Country House, a cookery spin-off from its latest reality-TV show, and it has also signed up Jamie Oliver, who may get a new lease of life under its control.

Llewellyn, meanwhile, suggests that fresh ideas for programmes could come from further afield than Britain. "At the moment we are developing a number of cookery TV ideas for the US, including a major series for Food Network," she explains. "US broadcasters are looking to Britain to reinvigorate their cookery programming. With their needs and our expertise we hope to take things in new directions that we can then feed back into the UK."