Michael's new show - is he on to a Winner? (From Bournemouth Echo)

Michael's new show - is he on to a Winner?

10:08am Monday 8th March 2010 in

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FORMER film director Michael Winner honed his palate reviewing food at the most classy of establishments.

However, the 74-year-old has turned his attentions to home cooking in his series, Michael Winner’s Dining Stars, which is on Fridays at 9pm on ITV1.

The programme sees Michael visiting people’s homes and judging their cooking and hosting skills – he then gives them a rating of one, two or three stars.

Do you expect restaurant quality food from the hopefuls?

To me the words “restaurant quality food” have no meaning, because you can go into 20 restaurants and they’re all quite different.

The best meal I ever had in my life was at a Women’s Institute fete in Wales. Everything they did was incredible, it was all done with love, it was all done with care.

It was great food and it was being served up by old ladies with white hair – they all had their clothes on at that time. So it’s all nonsense that Gordon Ramsay is the only person who can cook.

What does it take to impress you?

I just like good food. If there was a general thing they all did wrong it was that these people have cooked regular meals for their families for years, and they’re very good at it, they’ve honed their skills.

The minute I turn up, they throw all that out the window, and they start to do something posh or grand, and they try things they’re really not capable of.

Would you say you are a food snob?

Definitely not. I don’t like all this plate decoration, I don’t like all this pomp and circumstance. In the 1950s what you saw was what you got.

The meat looked like meat and the veg looked like veg. Today, it’s all so ponced about, you don’t know what half of it is.

How did you feel about criticising people’s cooking to their face?

It’s a job, that’s what the programme’s about. There was one dinner that was absolutely appalling and it’s too bad, I had to tell the truth.

You can’t shirk from that, otherwise you lose your position in the stratosphere. You just hope they’re not going to rush on to the stage and hit you. You have to tell the truth.

Every girl thinks she’s a model, every man thinks he’s a footballer or movie star, every woman thinks she’s a great cook.

Well they’re not all great cooks, and if they are they tend to go off the rails when I get in.

Did you grow up with home cooking and family meal times?

Oh yes, my mother was a good cook. She did a thing which was meat with an egg going through the middle, I don’t know how they do it, it’s like getting the ship in the bottle.

Are you hoping the programme will encourage families to eat together?

You look at the UK today and family life is disintegrating, isn’t it?

The people I went to were all families and it was very lovely for me, who would never have been in those circumstances, to join them.

There’s no way I would have been invited to those homes normally.

First of all they don’t know me, second of all they probably don’t want me, and thirdly, they’d think, ‘If we do want him there’s no way of getting him’, so it was just wonderful to touch base with people and learn from just being with them.

What is your own signature dish?

My signature dish is incompetence. No, I do cook, you can’t be a 90-year-old bachelor without being able to cook.

I can cook steaks, and I can do fry-ups, but I don’t have a signature dish – I have a signature mistake.

You lost three and a half stone recently. How do you keep it off?

I wrote a book about losing weight, so I have to keep it off. I don’t eat dinner, that’s the meal that kills you. You have to pull back, otherwise you’ll end up with a horrible face.

In the show you shout at your assistant Dinah quite a lot – are you always so mean to her?

There are certain parts of my house where the intercom doesn’t work so what you do if you want to get attention is you have a little yell, but it’s not serious, she hasn’t had a breakdown. She’s very fond of me, although she did put arsenic in the soup.

Which other cookery programmes do you like?

I don’t watch other cooking programmes, I only alight on them occasionally. I only watch documentaries.

You’ll be compared with Alan Sugar and Simon Cowell after this show – which of the two would you most like to be compared with?

Nobody likes to be compared to anybody because we all think we’re unique. I’d like to be as rich as Simon Cowell.

I love Simon, he’s terrific. I knew him when he was totally unknown; his mother didn’t even know who he was.

If you could be a judge on another programme, what would it be?

I like judging people generally. I wouldn’t mind a programme like The X Factor of people; that would be funny wouldn’t it?