Chewing is my specialist subject, so I’m really the last person to complain that there’s too much food on television. But there has to be a Mr Creosote moment when all good things make you want to explode in a tsunami of sick. Enough now.

The lads’ cooking club on Channel 4 is the final wafer: silly and embarrassing, it’s an attempt to make chefs the new rock’n’roll, or fashion photographers, or hairdressers; to transform dinner into the new hedge fund. It’s also comprehensively missed the dessert trolley of fashion. Celebrity chefs are utterly, utterly over. Trust me, I know about these things. Restaurants named after their chefs are as passé as glam-rock. Gordon Ramsay is the Phil Collins of canapés. Food on television has gone from information, through aspiration, to entertainment, and out the other side into a sort of fantasy theological science fiction — the lion, the witch and the smorgasbord.

Channel 4 has been heavily promoting Gordon, Jamie, Hugh and Heston as alternative sportsmen. That’s just so counter-intuitively weird: all those porky pudding- guts in trainers. The posters remind me of the Tracy boys from Thunderbirds: obviously, Heston is Brains, and Gordon is Gordon. Jamie’s probably Scott, and Hugh is Virgil. Nigella can be Lady Penelope, and Ainsley’s probably Parker. Come to think of it, puppet cookery might be worth watching.

Television at the moment is doing what television sadly does best: flogging a dead format. In this case, a lot of deceased ingredients and some very repetitive presenters. Cookery has definitely jumped the shark-fin soup and is suffering the curse of Top Gear, the belief that any subject can be spun into a worldwide franchise and audience magnet simply by the addition of large dollops of laddery.

There are many fallacies in this piece of Tristrams’ alchemy, not least that at the heart of Top Gear, there is driving fast, which is quite exciting, while at the heart of cookery, there is cooking fast, which just isn’t. And your payoff, your money shot, is eating. Watching folk do ecstatic chewing on television is always disgusting. It was Auberon Waugh who pointed out that the description of what you ate is invariably bilious, and that watching someone eat is either comic or noisome. Gordon always eats as if he’s swallowing the secret formula; Jamie as if it’s a bet or a competition; Hugh like a vicar taking laxatives; and Heston... well, Heston eats like a chameleon in a butterfly farm.

Two cookery shows have again underlined the flatness of the genre. The chef-presenters are all as clever, decent and inspired as any in the world, but on television, they are just adequate presenters. Could You Eat an Elephant? was a random-ish trip round the world with Fergus Henderson, the inspiring restaurateur and chef, and fellow restaurateur Jeremy Lee. Jeremy is very camp; Fergus has Parkinson’s disease. These are not attributes it’s easy to ignore, even for the sake of polite political correctness. It makes the tone of the programmes very odd, and not unlike a Brechtian version of Andrew Aguecheek and Toby Belch.

They are off in search of weird food. By “weird”, they mean food we don’t eat here, so they did the usual tourist stuff of cobra and dog and rat and African bush meat and beetles. What was depressing was that, instead of being an examination of why different people eat what they eat, and how societies grow around the food that is available, it was a sniggering, squeamish, lad-mag giggle at the disgusting and weird stuff Johnny Foreigner scoffs. For two chefs who have worked so hard to resurrect our national cuisine, you really would have expected them to approach others’ with a bit more respect and humility. I am sure this was great fun to make, but it was uncomfortable and uninclusive to watch.

Heston Blumenthal has been voted the greatest chef in the world. Despite that, he is a nice, thoughtful and relaxed man who makes witty and epigrammatic dishes that are based not, as you may have been led to believe, on complex chemistry and magic, but on simple memories and everyday flavours that are often related to his childhood. The format for Big Chef Takes on Little Chef was the revitalising of the moribund, tongue-numbing Little Chef motorway caffs. Why Heston should want to act as a consultant to this hasty, greasy-thumb, short-order eatery is not fully explained.

Presumably, it’s because a camera crew was involved. You can see what’s in it for Little Chef — more publicity than you could shake their rubber egg at. The programme manipulated and exploited a Ramsay-type row between the chef and the chief executive, a man who should never have been allowed in front of a camera, for his own sake. He kept saying: “I’m looking for more blue-sky, out-of-the-box thinking.” The Victorian essence of bringing civilisation to the frightful motorway masses was unworthy both of them and of Blumenthal. He is, in truth, the most original and exciting chef you’ll ever see. This format, with all its contortions, diminishes both him and the people it mocks.

These were two programmes where food was used to draw attention to cultural and aspirational differences, and I’m certain that’s not what any of the cooks involved wanted or imagined they were doing.

Neither programme had the essential ingredients all dinners need — hospitality and table manners.

In the past 12 hours, three people have asked me how Hunter is, in the way people ask after relatives in intensive care. Then each has added: “Oh, I do like that Hugh Bonneville.” Many people like Hugh Bonneville. I like Hugh Bonneville. He is a fine and likeable light comedian with a nicely tuned sense of timing and a face made for angst and confusion, a sort of drawing-room Martin Clunes. Everyone likes Hugh Bonneville, except, obviously, his agent.

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