Celebrity MasterChef review – if anyone can befuddle John Torode, it’s Sinitta

The billionth series of Celebrity MasterChef (BBC1) began, as you would expect, like every other series of Celebrity MasterChef. There were knives. There was food. There was an unsettling Fifteen to One gallery of distantly recognisable faces. And there was Gregg Wallace, eyes heavy and voice parched, croaking out yet another variation of “Cooking doesn’t get tougher than this”, like Robert Oppenheimer quoting the Bhagavad Gita.

For a programme that supposedly celebrates fine dining, the MasterChef franchise doesn’t half resemble McDonald’s these days. Sure, it might make the occasional nod to passing trends – pea puree becomes chicken ballotine becomes goji berries – but it still unwaveringly churns out the same old guff in the same old way without deviation all year round. We are powerless against a show such as Celebrity MasterChef. It is a runaway steamroller of a thing now. It will outlive us all.

That said, this new series – its trillionth, by all modern estimates – got off to an absurdly strong start last night. Because, while it may have seemed as if the programme had long since exhausted its box of tricks, it has only just discovered Sinitta.

That Sinitta had got this far without ever appearing on Celebrity MasterChef is either a miracle or an oversight. Her roll call of slightly grotty television appearances is endless. She’s been on The X Factor. She’s been on I’m a Celebrity. She’s been on Loose Women and Wife Swap and Never Mind the Buzzcocks and Come Dine With Me and Dancing on Ice and Grease is the Word and Hit Me Baby One More Time and Cirque De Celebrité and Who’s Doing the Dishes and The Jump. You could put out a casting call for a series where celebrities have to fart the alphabet in front of the disappointed ghosts of their dead ancestors and Sinitta would still be there, jostling with Louie Spence at the front of the queue.

But all those shows were simply a warm-up for the main event; for if anyone was born to make John Torode’s jowls wobble with befuddlement, it’s Sinitta. “My children think I’m an amazing cook,” she said early on, while mashing butter and vinegar together with such vigour that it made you want to find these poor kids and hand them a pasty.

Later came the now-customary Professional Kitchen round, where the celebrities visit a real restaurant and put sauce on things for an hour. Long-time MasterChef viewers will know this has nothing to do with cooking and everything to do with enduring the prissy demands of an obnoxious professional cook. Sinitta, bless her, took this bit especially hard. “He’s really different now,” she blubbered after a chef chided her for massacring a defenceless piece of cod with a palette knife.

One oft-unheralded fixture of the MasterChef universe is narrator India Fisher, who for years has managed to benignly nudge the action along with near-infinite reserves of patience. However, Sinitta’s culinary ineptitude represented a brave new challenge for Fisher: could she manage to describe these dishes without audibly dry-heaving? Miraculously, she could, the phrase “Sinitta’s beef and spinach mousse” reeled off without so much as a burpy retch.

Alas, with true inevitability, Sinitta ended up being the first to leave Celebrity MasterChef last night. This is a real shame, since her utter bafflement at every new situation she found herself in was incredibly charming. Maybe the BBC will give her an entire series called Sinitta Looks Exasperated At a Squid. I’d certainly watch that.

Still, this is Celebrity MasterChef, so all the contestants better than Sinitta – including comedian Tommy Cannon, a man billed as a “TV conman” and a godawful vlogger who kept saying “positive vibes” – will return tomorrow. Even without its greatest asset, Celebrity MasterChef rolls on. And on. And on. And on, until the seas are boiled and we are all ash. It will outlive us all.

The message of The £100K House: The Final Fix (BBC2) – just like the message of The House that £100K Built before it – seemed to be that anyone can build the house of their dreams on a budget, so long as they hate doors and interior walls and ceilings and convenience and fleeting moments of basic human happiness. This, surely, has to be the dying breath of the television property show, unless, in a fit of inspiration, Channel 4 commissions a series called Sarah Beeny: Upsell Your Ditch.