For almost two months, I have spent an undue amount of time thinking about food. About the perfect wobble and potential flavour combinations of a panna cotta. The ooze of a chocolate fondant. The importance of a well-placed parmesan crisp. The aromatics of herb oil. How in god’s name you make a “foam”, and why. Even though I don’t eat meat, I’ve also been thinking about just how long it takes to render the fat on a rack of lamb.

This isn’t because I’ve suddenly decided to learn cordon bleu or pivot to restaurant criticism – it’s because, like millions of others across the UK, I’ve spent seven weeks of my life glued to MasterChef. Now, the final is upon us, with Chris, Louise, Abi and Brin fighting it out for the crown. 

MasterChef is repetitive, formulaic and samey – and in its 20 series, it’s barely changed. It’s got the same Tweedledee and Tweedledum pair of judges, John Torode and Gregg Wallace. It’s got a revolving door of generally lovely but often forgettable contestants. And there are only so many things you can do to fondant potatoes.

It should have gone stale. So why, almost 20 years after it came to our screens (the first version, Master Chef, presented by Loyd Grossman, ran between 1990 and 2001, before it was revamped in its current iteration, originally as MasterChef Goes Large) is it still the most simultaneously soothing and compulsive show on TV? 

In today’s fast-paced TV industry, producers are competing with big-budget streaming platforms and the TikTok algorithm for audience attention – and are forced to find increasingly off-the-wall ways to engage viewers.

Some of the most popular non-scripted shows of the past decade have been Gogglebox (meta), Taskmaster (absurd) and The Traitors (psychologically manipulative). So you’d think that a straight-up cooking competition with little more plot or character intrigue than a school talent show wouldn’t be able to compete.

But compete it can: after The Great British Bake Off, MasterChef is the second-most popular cooking show in the UK, and its current series has weekly viewing figures hovering at around 3.5m – a very respectable number in today’s money, usually beaten only by classic soaps, the FA Cup and the evening news. 

Part of that is because with any given episode, we know what we’re going to get. Once you’ve figured out whether you’re watching a heat or a quarter final – MasterChef doesn’t follow a linear timeline, which also contributes to viewers’ lack of boredom – you can settle in for a relatively relaxed first challenge.

There’ll be some chat about which family member inspired and/or likes to eat the dish. Then there’ll be some kind of brief, involving a weird ingredient or occasion, which will be interpreted extremely liberally.

Everyone will say how much they want to stay in the competition. At some stage, they’ll have to cook for someone other than Gregg and John – a food critic or a chef or, in the heats, past contestants (MasterChef loves to appraise its own legacy). There will be unrisen choux pastry, underdone venison, overdone fish, split sauces, and just occasionally the kind of culinary magic that makes Gregg grin so widely his face expands to twice its normal size. There is rarely any drama we haven’t seen 100 times before. 

Yet still, every spring, the nation chooses to finish off the day with a lullaby of its dramatic music, inscrutable voiceover, Australian-and-Cockney-banter. There is little more thrilling to me than falling backwards into the sofa, loading up an episode and preparing for an hour of vicarious judgement. I love watching them run to the ice-cream maker and deep-fat fryer, and I love watching them put little flowers on the plates with tweezers, and I love the moment in between the judges taking a bite and delivering their verdict.

Most of all, I love the fact that I am rarely moved by any of it, and nor am I supposed to be – unlike with other reality TV, I don’t have to buckle in for an involuntary emotional rollercoaster. I can simply absorb, unchallenged, the enormity of the task ahead of the contestants, thinking vaguely about what I might do in their position. For most of us, being both gripped and relaxed is exactly what we need from wind-down weeknight TV. 

MasterChef’s first win is its judges. They are, in some ways, an unlikely pair: Gregg mainly wanders around shouting “phwooaaaar”, while John is a man of fewer words, valuing a slight tilt of the head as his primary form of communication.

Yet after all this time they still seem to genuinely like each other – and, because MasterChef has no presenters or talking to camera, their interactions feel unforced. Their chemistry and humour are essential to their judging, too: there are no X Factor panel spats here, just as there is no meanness or humiliation.

Contestants want to impress them, and the tasks are intense – but not because they’re scared of fragile-egoed deities like Simon Cowell or Bake Off’s Paul Hollywood, with his cringeworthy “Hollywood handshake”. They’re firm but fair – a crucial component of the MasterChef ethos, which is that drama is irrelevant, and hard work and talent are rewarded. 

Like all TV competitions, MasterChef turns the viewer into a judge. What sets it apart from super-saccharine talent shows is that there is none of the discomfort that makes us feel personally responsible for contestants’ happiness or fortune, and where they break down when they’re unsuccessful. (MasterChef contestants tend to wave a brisk goodbye, and that’s that.)  

Here, neither we nor the contestants are being exploited, so in the privacy of our own homes we can be as savage as we like. And thank god we don’t have to feel guilty – the main joy of watching MasterChef is to shout at your TV about how Charlotte’s absolutely f***ed her scallops and embarrassed herself with her bearnaise, all the while chomping on a mouthful of Quorn nuggets yourself – and then, five minutes later, giving her due respect for the way she’s plated her oyster mushroom pickles. Bake Off could never elicit such passionate commentary because its contestants are too sympathetic, and cake is fundamentally unserious. 

There is also relief to be found in the fact that MasterChef is not remotely instructional. There is no suggestion whatsoever that we should follow along or attempt to replicate the mad things they do at home – and this is such a welcome antidote to our culture of self-improvement, side hustles and millennial “multi-hyphenates”. Saturday Kitchen or a Jamie Oliver series can make us feel the itch to whip up a healthy brunch – not so on MasterChef. What they’re doing is simply too difficult. We are permitted to stay exactly where we are and watch someone else be stressed, not thinking, for once, about whether we, too, are pursuing our dreams. 

For this reason MasterChef has also served in recent years as an antidote to the food culture of social media. On TikTok and Instagram, I am constantly bombarded with videos of people telling me what to eat, how to cook it, why I’ve GOT to try this insane viral recipe, this crazy hack, a “marry me orzo”. There are constant instructions that can lead to overwhelm.

Watching MasterChef, I am perfectly happy just watching someone else do things without feeling guilty that I’m not doing it myself. I don’t always want to know what I’m doing wrong – I want John Torode to tell me exactly the ways in which six strangers have cocked up filleting a sea bream. 

The most important thing about MasterChef, though, is that it is genuinely meritocratic. Skill and talent are rewarded rather than personality, or people seeking quick fame. There are personal stories but no sob stories. You almost always feel that the person who deserved to go home went home.

Just like in a professional kitchen, MasterChef is methodical, with rules – and, best of all, as hard as its contestants are all working to follow them, this is a show that asks nothing of us in return.