http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/reviews/last-nights-television-combat-chefs-five-oceans-bbc2-travels-with-vasari-bbc4-1036686.htmlCombat Chefs sounds like a terrific notion. Release Gordon Ramsay and Marco Pierre White into a jungle arena, armed only with a three-inch paring knife and a steak mallet, and let them fight it out for a limited supply of ingredients. The winner is the one who produces the best three-course meal and sustains the fewest injuries. Sadly, Five's new series isn't an attempt to spice up a cookery format but an attempt to get a little novelty into another well-trodden genre: the uniformed-services ride-along. There have been quite a few documentaries about the armed forces recently, with Ross Kemp alone doing several tours of duty as Breathless Civilian Crouching Behind a Mud Wall in Lashkagar, but before Combat Chefs, no film crew had taken us into the simmering, free-fire zone of a British Army field kitchen.
I hope Raymond Blanc was watching, because there were weeks in The Restaurant when the culinary challenges seemed a little ho-hum, and there were ideas here he might usefully steal. For the improvised cookery competition in Gütersloh in Germany, for example, the contestants not only had to cook a meal from scratch, they had to build their own kitchen first, from the kinds of items you might plausibly scavenge from a battlefield. Dustbins insulated with mud proved particularly popular, though one enterprising contestant had been tempted by an old filing cabinet. And what emerged from these unlikely ovens was surprisingly ambitious. Sergeant Jay Kingsbury, of 35 Engineers, was serving up prawn-and-chorizo parcels, followed by lamb loin stuffed with black pudding and a reduced-port-and-cranberry jus. The thought occurred to you that Jay's soldiers would need to have a little post-prandial nap before returning to the front line.
Then again, when bullets are flying, things are, understandably, a little more rudimentary. The film also accompanied members of the catering corp on operation in Afghanistan, cooking for the troops at Forward Operating Base Price (crab claws, a monthly surf-and-turf barbecue, salad bar; in fact, rather like a Club Med with the threat of incoming mortar fire). Occasionally, the chefs ventured out to give soldiers in the field a break from boil-in-the-bag sausage and beans. In this case, they didn't have to construct their own kitchen – the Army has some very ingenious flat-pack ones you can hitch to a trailer – but they did have to survive long enough to get into it. Heading for an outlying fort through a notoriously dangerous town, Sergeant Hewitt and Private Tracey Montgomery (signature dish: pink custard and fairy sponge) had to take "top cover" on the convoy in case a suicide bomber attacked. Their menu wasn't quite as gastropub-aspirational as Jay's – meat and two veg and shop-bought gateau – but it seemed to be appreciated anyway. Back in Gütersloh, Jay deservedly scooped the trophy and was so moved that he burst into tears. I feel he may not be emotionally suited to a life in camouflage, but he'd be an absolute natural on MasterChef, and might make a pretty useful team member on Scrapheap Challenge as well.
