How to be a superstar of the food world, just like Heston Blumenthal

He has three Michelin stars and an OBE to his name, but the brave new world of celebrity cheffing threw Heston Blumenthal a curveball when he made headlines for growing out his trademark buzzcut.

"You think you do something noteworthy and might get a bit of coverage for it, then you let your hair grow for a month, get badly papped, and then it goes in every single newspaper," he says sadly from a barber's chair while the clippers restore his head to its denuded state.

It's one of the more memorable (and telling) scenes in the premier of Inside Heston's World, a four-part series about the much-publicised move of his restaurant the Fat Duck from sleepy Brae, outside of London, to Melbourne's Crown casino. The SBS-produced series follows Blumenthal and his sizeable retinue for a year, from the lead-up to the six-month relocation to Australia, to his return to England and the reopening of the new and improved Duck.

Everyone living on the grid will be aware his expensive gamble paid off – the Australian reservation ballot rather famously received 250,000 requests for 14,000 seats – but it doesn't preclude what SBS Head of Commissioning Alison Sharman​ calls "authentic jeopardy" as his team confronts a broad church of logistical nightmares, from quarantine regulations blocking their preferred variety of snails, to the stringent English language test that leave the international brigade quaking in their chefs' clogs.

It's telling that the idea for Inside Heston's World came from within the Blumenthal camp (and SBS "leapt at it", says Sharman). He and television are on very friendly terms (Heston's Feasts, in which he recreates historic English dishes, will be the best known to Australian audiences). Perhaps it's no coincidence that his first foray into the medium came in 2002, the same year he won his second Michelin star.

Speaking from the series launch at Dinner by Heston Blumental, the diffusion label restaurant that replaced the Fat Duck at Crown, the self-taught chef implicitly acknowledges that the impulse sustaining the wall-to-wall food coverage across multiple food networks – SBS launched its own 24-hour digital food channel late last year – is the same one creating a market for commentary about the state of his hair.

"Without a shadow of a doubt, yes," he says of the chef/TV symbiosis. "It really is necessary for a chef to do TV. A cookbook is something that shows the chef's work but TV can show the work, not necessarily better, but because you can hear the sizzle, you can feel the heat. It's a great medium to put your work across."

His buzzcut nods vigorous agreement when his PR manager, inimitable Scotswoman Monica Brown (she has a shining moment in episode three where she talks about wanting to "put a wee pillow over his head") adds that food TV took off because it's not adversarial in the way of other "reality" shows such as X Factor.

"TV has been fantastic for me," says Blumenthal. "But I've been very clear about doing only TV that gives the opportunity for research and development, because it focuses on putting out a message (and) trying to inspire. What I don't do are things like Strictly Come Dancing, I must have been asked four times now, I'm a Celebrity, three or four times. I can just reel them off."

SBS audiences adore Heston, says Sharman. Of course, the network now has its dedicated digital Food Network to support; it has embraced food in such a wholesale fashion, she says, because "food is a way of telling multicultural stories in a warm and engaging way". And let's face it: food TV has a particularly long use-by date, but audiences cannot live on Guy Fieri alone.

These days, of course, Blumenthal is less a chef, more of an international brand. He no longer cooks in his own restaurants (as acknowledged in the Inside Heston's World narration) but attracts the kind of talent capable of bringing his vision to life for each new wave of diners. Most people will never get to eat his food anyway: even for those who managed to wangle a booking at the Fat Duck, its $525-a-head price tag was something to be reckoned with. TV's role is to democratise what is essentially a hobby of the lucky few, and the point is not lost on its Crown Prince. "TV is incredibly important because without it, this" – he gestures at the empty restaurant – "wouldn't be happening. It shows the emotion, it shows the connection, that people have with food."

So how does Heston rate in the annals of celebrity? He certainly scores high on the approachability scale – not only could the man could talk under wet cement, he appears to know the names of the staff at his Melbourne outpost. Where audiences might get the feeling that someone such as the bellicose and volatile Gordon Ramsay is all tip and no iceberg, four hours of fly-on-the-wall Blumenthal reveals he is the same person when the cameras are turned off. "I don't shout," he says calmly. He also has a talent for flattering his hosts: Australian cooking is exciting because it is free from ideas about "right" and "wrong", he says.

And Australia in particular, he says, is nuts about food. "I got in a cab here a couple of years ago and the taxi driver started talking to me about how his sister had been playing around with fermenting beetroot and they were trying to create an extra pocket in pita bread. Seriously. That would never happen in the UK."

WHAT Inside Heston's World

WHEN SBS, Thursday (March 31), 8.30pm

How to be a celebrity chef

When contemplating the rise of the celebrity chef it would be wise to pay heed to the words of the writer Livy, who sometime around the birth of Christ blamed Roman decadence (at least in part) on cooks rising above their station: "And it was then that the cook, who had formerly the status of the lowest kind of slave, first acquired prestige and what had once been servitude came to be thought of as an art."

The Romans weren't alone in worshipping their chefs. The Ottomans and Spanish did, too. They all would have loved the Food Network. And that's where modern chefs have a distinct advantage over their ancient counterparts – they can take advantage of paths to celebrity that weren't an option two millennia ago.

Considering many Australians are well aware of chef superstars without ever having encountered their food first-hand (and even fewer would have managed to cook the recipes in The Fat Duck cookbook), it points to the inescapable fact that TV chefs are entertainers as much as they are educators.

Here's a step-by-step guide to conquering the world via the kitchen.

1. Learn to cook. Sounds simple, doesn't it? Learn to cook well, preferably by toiling under a celebrated chef. Not only will it provide good grounding in the slings and arrows of the commercial kitchen, it will allow your PR agent (when you finally graduate to having a PR agent) to throw your former mentor's name about with gay abandon.

2. Strike out on your own. It's time to get that PR agent. Stuff the opening night invitation list with as many luvvies as you can.

3. The cookbook. Congratulations, you're halfway there. Pepper it with casual shots of you hanging out with your family at farmers' markets and foraging for native succulents along the beachfront.

4. The TV show. Consider your shtick: the whole stand-and-stir thing went out the door a couple of decades ago. Will you be a sexy goddess, like Nigella, a wacky scientist like Heston – or just really annoying, like Guy Fieri?

5. A small scandal will help at this stage as you make the move from the newspaper's food section to its gossip column (insert Heston's divorce and new girlfriend, or Nigella's cocaine confession here).

6. You have arrived. Commercial opportunities abound, whether it's being a brand "ambassador" for a luxury car company or spruiking the honest food values of a multinational supermarket chain.