The nation’s sitting rooms were awash with testosterone last night as television’s biggest bruisers slugged it out. In the Channel 4 corner was toilet-mouthed, slash-faced Gordon Ramsay, back – goody, goody – for eight more Kitchen Nightmares in which he batters into shape failing restaurants. In ITV1’s corner was Roger Cook, the burly Kiwi investigator, revisiting for one night only the past triumphs of The Cook Report on Roger Cook’s Greatest Hits. Ramsay is a man who knows how to cook. Cook, paradoxically given his name, looks like a man who knows how to eat. They’re television’s greatest heavyweights.

On Kitchen Nightmares it looked at first as if there had been a mismatch and Ramsay’s bout with the Brighton restaurateur Allan Love might have to be stopped. Ramsay arrived, declared Ruby Tate’s attempt at a fish platter disgusting and possibly poisonous and quizzed its owner on his finances. Love, a bouncy 60-year-old actor, as luvvie as you like, explained that he had just borrowed another £30,000 to bail out the restaurant and dissolved into tears. Fortunately, there were a couple of chefs up for a pounding, a take-the-mick Australian called Jamie and, well I never, an arrogant Frenchman. Jamie admitted he’d fire himself were he in charge, Ramsay’s recipe for turnaround was the usual back-to-basics one: he stripped the restaurant’s decor and replaced the iffy oysters and Greek sea bass with local yet “sustainable” fish and chips. The programme did the usual irritating things of suggesting a joint could be redecorated in the morning and searching for interesting “visuals” (this time making the staff walk the plank of a fishing boat).

But the fun was seeing Love take on Ramsay in the second round. It was the criticism of his wall art that had got to him. A painting by a local artist in Dulux’s vomit range incorporated a pair of knickers. Ramsay called them “crusty”. Love said he had crossed a line with “crusty”. Ramsay accused him of play-acting. Love accused Ramsay of being unable to play any part but Gordon Ramsay. Ramsay said how dare he. Boys, boys. Three months on Ruby Tates, now renamed Love’s, was raking in £14,000 a week.

There were fewer happy endings on Roger Cook’s Greatest Hits, whose theme was that, although Cook pursued the scum of the earth to its very ends, the “powers that be” would “somehow let them sip through their fingers”. And so “canned hunting” safaris, in which morons pay heavily to shoot drugged and trapped African lions, are still thriving ten years after Cook’s exposé. The Costas del Crime, whose disreputable citizens were so long badgered by Cook, are now controlled by East European gangs. The Triads, whom Cook 14 years ago pursued from Hong Kong to Manchester, have given up trafficking videos and now traffic people. Most irritating of all, John Palmer, a time-share conman and money launderer, was, despite his conviction, living in all the luxury Essex can afford in his country mansion and has not paid a penny to those he defrauded.

Cook was one of those television reporters who wrote scripts in tabloidese but whose investigations, because they were exhaustive and fearlessly went for the big targets, upheld the best tabloid values. It was a sad irony that he was brought down in 2000 by a redtop’s investigation into his own methods and that, although the News of the World later withdrew its allegations, Cook never again found a slot on ITV.

Greatest Hits disappointed with its lack of hits (to his face, solar plexus, etc). Maybe there were fewer violent confrontations than one remembers. There were certainly, however, some great TV moments: the safari leader who, even after it had been carefully explained to him that he had been set up, continued to show Cook how to aim his rifle at a dozy lion; the con expelled from his favourite Spanish watering hole for telling Cook he would have some “respect” knocked into him; the Triad Georgie Pie, confronted in a Stockport police station and, having asked the cops for protection, scampering out into the night . . .

It used to be said of a famous CBS journalist that the most feared words in America were “Mike Wallace is here to see you”. It must surely be time the criminal classes once again heard the words: “I’m Roger Cook from ITV.”

Out of the box

The Cook Report and Kitchen Nightmares are unimprovable formats. The History of the World Backwards (BBC Four last night) was a case of a format so obscure that some exec should have told its inventor, Rob Newman, it could not possibly work. The sketch show’s conceit was that history runs in reverse but, wait for it, time doesn’t. So Mandela enters prison a Spice Girls fan and leaves it a terrorist; Galileo has a picture of Einstein hanging on his wall; Alexander Graham Bell makes the last premium-rate phone call. Get it? Nor did I. Some good jokes and challenging politics were lost. It was like watching an Adam Curtis documentary gone mad. Talking of formats, my quote of the week: Chris Tarrant, presenter of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? and Tarrant on TV tells the new Radio Times: “One thing I really hate is formulaic TV.”

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