Being Gordon Ramsay ★★
“Let’s go,” Gordon Ramsay urges everyone around him – including himself – throughout this documentary series. The British celebrity chef is on a six-month journey to open a massive food complex with five different restaurants atop the London skyscraper 22 Bishopsgate. Between work and family there’s no time to pause, no space for contemplation. It’s the same with this show, which dashes between household and building site, media work and family events. Much happens, but this expletive-laden narrative is rarely revealing. It lacks flavour.
Directed by Dionne Bromfield and produced by Studio Ramsay Global, the six episodes are crisply made and provide a crafted window into the “real Gordon Ramsay”. That infamous temper? Mellowed apparently, and besides, it was all conveniently in the service of achieving perfection. The show takes inspiration from a previous Netflix success, 2023’s Beckham, which used carefully regulated but nonetheless amusing banter between David and Victoria to create the illusion of insight. We’re in the age of the celebrity-controlled documentary.
Ramsay’s wife of 30 years, Tana, is a thoughtful presence – mostly supportive, occasionally mocking. She, too, talks up 22 Bishopsgate as a “huge undertaking”, but frankly that narrative is over-egged given the show can’t help but also emphasise how vast Ramsay’s global restaurant and media empire is. He delivers new eating establishments and reality television shows constantly; no one setback could stop him. A frank discussion of how he got to that point is lacking here. Bromides about hard work suffice.
It’s both disappointing and unsurprising that Ramsay, a natural on the screen, has reached this point. Television gave him a profile, thanks to the still-fascinating 1999 British documentary series Boiling Point (YouTube is your best bet). That was uncut Ramsay, a compelling kitchen obsessive who still spent every night at the pass. Since then, he’s learnt to market himself and control the narrative. Being Gordon Ramsay doesn’t have a narrator and only rarely is a voice heard off-screen with a query. Ramsay does it all.
It’s watchable, whether Ramsay is taking his daughter Tilly shopping for her first chef whites or he’s pointing out flaws in the set-up of the Asian-inspired Lucky Cat, the largest of the five establishments. But the constant flow of authorised, surface-level celebrity documentaries that are shaped by their subjects is only growing, and it speaks to a broader issue of who controls the flow of information in today’s world. “The things we do for f—ing food,” remarks an exasperated Ramsay at one point. He delivers it as a joke, but perhaps that hunger for control is actually the problem
Being Gordon Ramsay is now streaming on Netflix.
Find out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday.
Craig Mathieson is a TV, film and music writer for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.Connect via X.
