Not What You Meant? There are 65 definitions for TV One. Also try: F word.

The F-Word

About 5 pages (1,385 words)

Questions on this topic? Just ask!

The F-Word

Format	Food magazine/Cooking show
Starring	Gordon Ramsay
Country of origin	United Kingdom
No. of episodes	27 (through Series 3)
Production
Running time	44 Minutes
Broadcast
Original channel	Channel 4
Original run	October 27, 2005 – present
External links
Official website
IMDb profile

The F-Word is a British food magazine and cooking show featuring celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay. The programme covers a wide range of topics, from recipes to food preparation and celebrity food fads. The programme is made by Optomen Television and aired weekly on Channel 4. The theme tune is a 2000 single of the same name by the UK band Babybird. The first season was filmed at Ladbroke Grove, West London. The second season's restaurant is Deep, located in the Imperial Wharf, south-west London, near the Thames. A third series has aired on Channel 4. The show has been broadcast around the world, including in South Korea where it was renamed "Cook-King".^[1] Although aired on Channel 4 in the UK, it was shown on BBC America in the US.

1 Programme segments
2 Controversy
- 2.1 Women in the kitchen
- 2.2 Animal slaughter
3 References
4 External links

Programme segments

Series 1

Each episode is centred on Ramsay preparing a three-course meal at the F-Word restaurant for 50 guests. The Times' restaurant critic Giles Coren acts as a field correspondent. Food writer Rachel Cooke also provides several reports on healthy eating. Regular segments within an episode include:

Conversation with celebrity diners like Sharon Osbourne, Martine McCutcheon, Joan Collins, and Jonathan Ross. Ramsay often invited them into the kitchen to learn a recipe or cooking skill.
Two (or three) commis squaring off to earn a position at one of Ramsay's restaurants. 12 commis chefs appeared in the series out of a thousand applicants.
Ramsay raised turkeys in his garden, so that his children gained a better understanding of where their food came from. Chef and television presenter Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall regularly offered tips on raising free range turkeys. The turkeys were named after other celebrity chefs, for example, Ainsley, Antony and Nigella.
As part of the "Get Women Back in the Kitchen" campaign, Ramsay visited several English households to help women who wanted to improve their culinary skills.
Pudding (dessert) challenge, usually between Ramsay and a celebrity guest. The winner had the honour of serving his or her pudding to the guests at the F-Word restaurant.
Giles Coren and Rachel Cooke examined several food and restaurant related issues from male fertility to misleading packaging in supermarkets. Coren's segments also featured him sampling more unusual foods such as squirrel meat and horse milk.

Series 2

Ramsay and his amateur brigade plating dessert at the F-Word restaurant

Janet Street-Porter is this series' field correspondent. There were other changes from the format in Series 1:

The time slot of the show was pushed back to post-watershed to incorporate Ramsay's colourful language, this has remained the case into series 3.
The restaurant seated 50 paying guests. If diners found any of their food unsatisfactory, they could choose not to pay for that item.
A different amateur brigade worked in the F-Word kitchen each week.
Instead of turkeys, this series featured Ramsay raising pigs in his garden, which he named Trinny and Susannah. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall returned to offer tips on raising the pigs.
The celebrity pudding challenge was changed to a general cooking challenge. For example, the series premiere featured a lasagne cook-off between Gordon and Angela Griffin.
This series emphasized the importance of Sunday lunch, with Ramsay teaching families how to prepare this meal on a regular basis.
Giles Coren only appeared in the series in a limited capacity; he reported on the Pimp That Snack phenomenon and even baked a "pimped" Jaffa Cake for submission on the website.

Series 3

Series 3 followed the same format as series 2, with the following differences:

Ramsay was raising lambs in his garden, which were set to be slaughtered near the end of the series. They were named Charlotte and Gavin, after Charlotte Church and Gavin Henson. The lambs were a Charollais-Welsh cross.^[2] Charlotte was killed by an unknown animal, possibly a big cat.^[3] Gavin escaped slaughter because he was being treated with antibiotics.
Fast food was the target of the underlying campaign, proving that fast food does not have to be bad food.
The amateur brigades were competing to cook in Ramsay's restaurant at Claridge's. The brigade with the most amount of paying customers at the end of the series, wins.
The series ran a competition to find a new "Fanny Cradock".

Controversy

Women in the kitchen

A major component of the programme is Ramsay's "Get Women Back in the Kitchen" campaign. In a self administered survey he found that three-quarters of women couldn't cook, with some 78% never cooking a regular evening dinner. Women found cooking to be a chore, whereas men found it to be an enjoyable activity. Ramsay claimed that women "know how to mix cocktails but can't cook to save their lives." ^[4] Ramsay's findings were met with mixed reactions. While some of his contemporaries, like Nigella Lawson, previously stated similar opinions, other celebrity chefs, like Clarissa Dickson Wright, felt Ramsay's proposition was "rubbish and about ten years out of date". ^[5] Wright felt that these comments undermined the increased enrollment of women at culinary schools across the United Kingdom. As a result of this survey, the first series of The F-Word featured a segment where Ramsay goes to the house of a woman who has requested his assistance. There he shows them how to cook a typical meal and gives them encouragement to attempt other dishes on their own. His intentions have been misunderstood by some who believe that he thinks women belong in the kitchen or should be doing the cooking for their husbands, whereas his real desire is to help women who want to be able to cook but lack the confidence or motivation.

Animal slaughter

The penultimate episode of the first series featured the slaughter of six turkeys that were raised in Ramsay's garden. The scene had been preceded with a content warning. 27 viewers complained about the slaughter, leading to an investigation by Ofcom. Conversely, the media watchdog and Channel 4 also received 18 letters of support to counter the complaints. In 2004, Ramsay had also been criticised by the broadcast watchdog for swearing on-air. In the second series, viewers also saw the slaughter of his two pigs, where their brains were stunned with an electric shock, before being slaughtered.^[6] It should be noted that Ramsay raised turkeys in his garden so that his children (and viewers) could gain a greater appreciation of where their food came from. A few months earlier, another Channel 4 series, Jamie's Great Italian Escape (featuring Jamie Oliver) also received similar complaints after it featured the slaughter of a lamb. In the same vein, the end of series two saw the pigs that were raised throughout the series, taken to an abattoir and slaughtered, as were the lambs he kept at the end of series three. Warnings were given to viewers before the start of the programme explaining the graphic nature of the footage, there was no censoring of the death or evisceration of the animal. Also, during the 3rd series, Charlotte, whilst being raised at Beckingham Palace was mysteriously slaughtered. After the same episode, the viewers were urged to phone in if they had sussed out the Cluedo-esque slaughtering. Further into the series, they thought it was a sort of fox or wolf.