Gordon Ramsay cooks up new role as game show host

Gordon Ramsay is taking on a new screen role – as game show host.

The celebrity chef, 53, famous for his potty mouth, will begin filming Bank Balance for BBC One later this year.

The BBC’s controller of entertainment commissioning, Kate Phillips, said the star “will be a formidable and unforgettable host”.

Programme makers said contestants on the “high-stakes” and “high-pressure” show, which has no link to food, can “build themselves a fortune, or see it come crashing down in an instant”.

Ramsay, star of Hell’s Kitchen and Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, said the prime-time series would be “truly epic”.

He added: “It is such an intense game with so much jeopardy to win big and lose even bigger, where the difference between failure and success is always in the balance.

“I’m so happy to be working with the fantastic team at the BBC and cannot wait to get in the studio and start stacking those gold bars.”

The show has been created and will be produced by the chef’s production company, Studio Ramsay.

Ramsay is also preparing another, previously announced, new BBC show.

Potential food and drink entrepreneurs will be put “through hell” in Gordon Ramsay’s Future Food Stars.

A winner will get the star’s financial backing to get their idea off the ground.

Ramsay is known for his swearing – Channel 4 show Ramsay’s Hotel Hell sparked an Ofcom investigation after the expletive-laden programme was broadcast in the morning.

Ramsay, who has enjoyed success with his Michelin-starred restaurants, and his wife Tana became parents to their fifth child, son Oscar, in April.

He later told the Mail On Sunday’s Event magazine: “I was as white as a ghost. I fell back into the chair and I fainted. They said ‘Tana’s fine. I think it’s you we need to look after next’.”

In 2017, Ramsay’s father-in-law Chris Hutcheson, was jailed for six months for hacking the celebrity chef’s company computer system to steal information during a high-profile falling out.