TV review: Jamie & Jimmy's Food Fight

Channel 4 has proven that you need just one monkey and some cooking ingredients to make a successful career as a celebrity chef.

Yes, Jamie Oliver is back on our screens (although it seems like he's never off the TV) with Jamie & Jimmy's Food Fight Club. Joined by fellow Essex Boy and farmer turned TV host, Jimmy Doherty, last night's episode of the chef's new series saw the inveterate presenters go toe-to-toe with the Germans in a battle of the bangers.

Somehow hoping to play on some vague sense of sausage-based national pride, the show followed the duo's attempt to create some British sausages that would exceed German high standards.

Brazenly going against all advice about how our Teutonic cousins prefer their sausages, the lads vied for some British representation at the Prince of Bavaria's own restaurant. Up against a German master butcher, the last few minutes of the show were genuinely tense as the sausages were judged by a panel – with the Bavarian entry coming out the wurst of the two.

I say lads, because that's how the duo was desperately trying to act for the cameras, instead coming across like bland imitations of Smithy from Gavin and Stacey. Stretching the ribald blokey banter routine for a solid hour, they inevitably giggled like schoolgirls nearly every time a sausage was on screen. At one point even playing Marvin Gaye's Let's Get it On while feeding their meat through the sausage machine.

I'm not averse to schoolboy humour, but they're so infantile and useless at injecting comedy banter into the programme I was starting to wonder if they'd also be making an appearance in the documentary 15-Stone Babies that followed the show.

The pair were also joined at their restaurant on Southend's pier by the erstwhile Oscar award-winning actress, Gwyneth Paltrow. Proving to be surprisingly entertaining, she told the pair how her husband, Coldplay frontman Chris Martin, is as handy with food as he is with singing – nearly burning their house down the two times he's tried cooking.

Her presence also helped pad out the show with some food challenges including a contest with Jimmy as to who could fit the most marshmallows in their mouth – Gwyneth proving her multitude of talents also includes possessing a mouth that could accommodate a horse and cart. Unfortunately, the humour felt about as forced as those marshmallows.

It wasn't all bad though, Jimmy was allowed his own five-minute segment, showing us how radiation can both sterilise and preserve food.

The premise of creating a food time capsule for his children was admittedly odd; in fact besides digging up the remains of your childhood pet, I can't imagine there are many things worse than finding a 50-year-old bag of spaghetti in your back garden. Although it must be said, watching a grown man eating a steak that had been used as a multi-purpose mop and urinal cake in a truck-stop toilets – a piece of meat replete with pubic hair – just to prove the point that radiation can eradicate bacteria was one of the most gag-worthy things on TV since Paul Burrell was on I'm a Celebrity.

One last thought, if this is indeed a fight club, then perhaps they should pay more credence to the first and second rules of Fight Club – you do not talk about fight club – and we can be saved from the prospect of a second series.

By Robert James Taylor