“COOKING doesn’t get tougher than this,” bellows spoon-gobbling Gregg Wallace at the start of each episode of the latest, tediously-long series of Masterchef (BBC 1, 9pm, Wednesdays).

I beg to differ. Have you ever tried following a recipe on Saturday Kitchen (BBC 1, 10am, Saturdays). Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve always worked on the assumption that TV recipes which you watch in the telly in the morning, you should be able to make at home in the evening, without the need to go and grab tools from the garden shed.

A fortnight ago, flat-vowelled chef-turned-TV-host-and-sometime-motoring-journalist James Martin marvelled as one of the ‘great chefs’ (the BBC press office’s words, not mine) used a blow-torch to make some sort of leaf more glossy.

This, to me, is where going a little off-piste in the kitchen ends and checking you’ve pre-booked your place at A and E begins. It wasn’t a one-off, either. Last weekend, Ken Hom, described as the man who introduced us all to Chinese food, openly admitted the rather medieval nails-out-of-a-stick contraption he was using wasn’t available in the UK – which rather scuppers any chance of us viewers following suit turning a piece of belly pork into a pin cushion, doesn’t it?

(If Ken Hom really was responsible for my first taste of Chinese – a runny sweet and sour at a Leyland takeaway, then he really doesn’t deserve a place on Saturday Kitchen, but I suspect he wasn’t).

Bad takeouts in Lancashire to one side, Saturday Kitchen is the same every week. Generally B-list (at best, Hom excepted) chefs looking to promote a restaurant or show off their love of a little-known meat do battle with the a C-list celebrity who normally has to dash off for their matinee performance (‘Not too much of the Merlot for me, I want to remember my lines, ha ha’) for a chance to do a quick plug.

Then there are the two generally annoying ‘normal people’ invited in to observe. One can normally cook, the other can’t. Getting up at the crack of dawn to go to a TV studio to watch food which you’ll only get one bite of – depending on the celebrity’s appetite – being cooked seems thoroughly bonkers to me.

But all of that pales into insignificance alongside the nauseating omelette challenge. Said chefs battling to make an omelette as quickly as possible. Cue Martin with his egg-scruciating puns about eggs, like a cracked, protein-obsessed nutter. They’ve been doing this since 2006. It’s the same every week. It’s boring.

Adding in clips of other cookery programmes must have seemed like a great idea at the time, but it only takes 10 minutes of Keith Floyd or Rick Stein to show everything which is wrong with Saturday Kitchen. These men are legends, yet their recipes seem simple. They concentrate on their cooking, and don’t bombard me with facts about the latest series of Hustle as they go.

That’s what cooking programmes should be about. Cooking. Saturday mornings in the 1990s were about Run the Risk, the children’s game show which made up part of Live and Kicking. These days, the risks are much greater – but only if you dare copy a Saturday Kitchen menu.

This week I’ll be watching: Inside Men (BBC 1, 9pm, tonight). John Coniston is the manager of a cash counting house who finds himself in the middle of his worst nightmare: an armed robbery. His family are taken hostage and the gang force him to open the safe at gunpoint. John has been trained for this moment, but is he prepared for the real thing? I’m guessing the answer is probably no, as otherwise it’d be a training video, not a drama series.