Is Gordon laughing at us?

It was the moment the television camera sought out the reclusive young woman in the Hell's Kitchen dining room that brought everything into perspective.

For that young woman was Jade, who made her name in Big Brother, the fifth series of which was showing on one of the other TV channels.

Now she was sitting at a table with knives and forks and napery, and other people were singing for her supper. Jade had made the grade.

For there is no doubt that the Big Brother compound is the bottom rung in the reality TV food chain.

This is slob city, with beer for breakfast, sex for lunch and the English language fed to the dog for his dinner.

The breakfast bird is Kitten, who is operating in the guise of a feisty, vegetarian lesbian. That guise is understandable when a fellow called Victor announces, apropos of not much at all: "They call me the plumber. I like to lay pipe on the women." Victor, who giggles to an international standard, then fillets the Queen's English thus: "He goes to me, like, and it's like, it's like like."

At this point, the intelligent observer would turn away and quietly despair of the human race. Or they might choose to align themselves with the comparatively civilised Gordon Ramsay, who offers up a bouillabaisse of bad language served up on a bed of sauce.

The "coughing major" Ingram is served a Strepsil as an amusebouche while Gordon sniggers behind his hand. Angus Deayton wanders among the diners dispensing cynical one-liners like a human pepper grinder.

This is upmarket reality for people in the know. The celebrities staffing Gordon's kitchen have already been through the Big Brother experience in one way or another. When Matt Goss plumps for a slow-roasted recipe, we know it is because he has been flash-fried before. Abi Titmuss, secure in her role as sexual agent, is free to choose loin. What could be more appropriate?

Edwina Currie, despite what amounts to a pathological aversion to showing any form of team spirit, is generally revered.

The six remaining wannabe chefs, the teams attired in colours that suggest U-boat crews versus the Russian navy, are having a delightful time, orchestrated by the syncopated bleepings of MC Gordon.

Meanwhile, back in the Big Brother compound, the quest for some sort of celebrity is only just beginning and the attempts to grasp this most devalued of holy grails bear the stamp of the rank amateur.