Gordon Ramsay is hungry. He’s always hungry now, since he gave up the fags. Six weeks and four days the app tells him and he tries to be proud of this but he finds that he feels nothing much at all. He stares listlessly out of the car window, the same filler rural landscape speeding by as it always did, no matter what shithole they were carting him off to this week. When they started 'Kitchen Nightmares' there were times he could tell himself they were doing something decent, they were helping these beleaguered people out.

As it went on the producers learned that the audience weren’t that interested in seeing pleasant, mild-mannered Sheila and Tony learn how to do their bookkeeping and pan fry a trout. They wanted to see filth. They wanted maggot ridden mince and teenage potwashes with criminal convictions smoking a spliff threateningly from the doorway as the service went to pieces. So they kept finding the worst, and then even worse than that, excitedly goading Gordon to put on the big shouting show that most people in the world now knew him for. He keeps telling himself this is the last season but there would always be some school fee or a tabloid to pay off that made him stay for just one more. Now they were onto season 17.

“Last one, last one,” he thinks miserably as they arrive into Tepshire, where the latest hapless oiks were running a cafe into the ground. The Yabba it was called, and from a brief glance at the menu Gordon had wondered despairingly how they were managing to mess up the likes of liver and onions and jacket potato with beans and cheese. “Deep breaths,” he thinks as they exit the car and he readies himself to begin the spiel.

The Yabba is little more than a standard semi detached house with most of the walls knocked down. What should be the living room hosts eight two-top formica tables with vinegar and sauce on them, and behind that in view of the customers, the owner and cook Stephen prepares the food. Stephen is a good looking tall lad with a knowing smirk. It could be off putting, even threatening, the smirk, but Gordon sees it quite a lot. Blokes who think they’re Billy Big Bollocks and can’t stand their egos getting torn down by another man- and in their kitchen! He’ll come around, Gordon thinks. Or not. Who cares.

Gordon orders: a bowl of tomato and herb soup and the special sandwich of the day which is bacon and liver with crispy cabbage and onions. The waitress who takes his order is Stephen’s daughter Janette and he can’t help but notice through the veil of his misery that she’s a cracker. She’s got something of her father’s mocking slyness to her expression, but she’s wholesome too, that wide-faced milk-fed country girl glow that can’t be cultured. He smiles up at her as she takes her leave and she pulls a face, letting her mouth go slack and crossing her eyes, a pastiche of a dunce. He laughs in surprise and discomfort but she smiles back at him then and he likes her.

The soup, despite being a can of Heinz, is inedible because of the amount of powdered supermarket basil poured in. As Gordon begins his routine- “My dog would turn his fucking nose up at that and he licks his own arsehole all day”- the other diners turn one by one to stare at him unabashedly and with open contempt. His face grows hot and the words dry up in his throat. Taking a bite of the sandwich he is alarmed by an unexpected texture. The unyielding thick rubber of raw fat nauseates him. He pulls it out of his mouth and takes it apart and finds that the bacon is totally uncooked. He stares at it in disbelief, then turns to the other customers who are still watching him without shame.

“How are you eating this? I’m genuinely worried for you.”

There is a silence. An elderly woman in a navy duffel coat is eating the same sandwich as Gordon. He notices she is wearing gloves, even as she holds the food.

“We love the food here,” she says to him with a perfectly passive affect.

Gordon is filled suddenly with the desire to cry, to hide away somewhere, but first he must do his duty of bollocking Stephen. In the hotel that night he can’t sleep and wishes he had stayed in the cottages with the production crew across the town. He had thought the blank neutrality of a hotel would be good for his mental state and let him sleep, but he had been thinking of big city hotels, not this homely run down kind. Everything was someone’s horrible old house, he thought to himself bitterly, nothing was just clean and new. That was the problem with all these places, everywhere in them was too much itself, invasively intimate. In a city there were so many places to be blank.

In the morning his driver doesn’t come and nobody is answering their phones. Eventually somebody picks up the assistant director’s, but it isn’t Carl himself. The voice is one of theirs. He tells Gordon he is the manager of the cottages and that there had been a flood. Some of the equipment needs to be checked over, so the team would be late and meet him at The Yabba later on. The thought of going back there is intolerable, of looking at their miserable food and dirty cupboards. Why weren’t they ashamed? Why were they able to look him in the eye, living the way they did?

In the kitchen with Stephen he is trying to warm himself up. The crew will be here soon and he knows he needs to get himself in the mood, he won’t be able to turn it on just like that when they get in. It feels surreal to do it without being filmed, the performance of anger. He tries to clear some of the fog of sadness off his chest and get annoyed instead. As Stephen and two underlings tell him the daily routines dispassionately- who buys in the produce and washes up and labels containers- the anger does begin to come. They didn’t give a fuck about making decent food, that was clear enough, but they were dirty and lazy too and he felt the reassuring soar of indignance in his chest.

“Who the fuck do you think you are, serving people gone off chicken and slimy salad leaves? It might be good enough for you Stephen in whatever hovel you crawl home to each night but you can’t serve that to me.”

“Oh aye is it?” Stephen says mildly, still looking amused. “Not good enough for you, but right enough for us lot round here?”

“I don’t care if those cretins out there will swallow your slop, it’s simply not good enough.”

“Oh?”

“Is that all you can say? Why can none of you fuckers speak? Why can’t you string a thought together, make an intelligent decision, and SPEAK?”

Stephen turned from the cucumber he had been chopping to face Gordon, and said,

“It’s not enough you want us down the mines, you want us singing opera as well?”

And then he starts to laugh. Gordon had seen chefs react to his criticism like this before, but that had been nervous, deflective laughter. Stephen is laughing with genuine pleasure, it seems. He is bent double with it and slapping his knee. The two teenage boys who work with him in the kitchen join in as well. His hands begin to shake, wishing to God the crew would arrive. The kitchen door swings open but it’s only Janette, and then The Yabba’s patrons. They filter in one by one and begin to laugh too when they see how raucous Stephen is.

Gordon stumbles backwards and kicks over a mop and bucket, sending another uproarious wave around the room. He fumbles for his phone, he needs, needs- something. Needs Dave the director to come and sort this, or his wife, or the police. But what would he say to them? That he is being laughed at?

He feels a solid rectangle in his pants but when he takes it out it isn’t a phone. His phone is gone. They have taken it. In its place is a pack of cigarettes. Stephen straightens up, wiping his eyes, still giving little gasps of laughter every other breath, and reaches out with a lighter.

“Go on, have one, no harm now” he says, pressing it into Gordon’s hand.

And when he looks up from the wavering flame held in his quaking fist, breathing in- ahhhh- it is beginning. It’s Janette who takes the first step.