Have you ever watched one of Gordon Ramsay's many, many TV shows and thought, "But what does he get up to when he's not bollocking someone in a kitchen?" No, me neither. And yet, Being Gordon Ramsay, the latest in a long line of vapid PR exercises masquerading as Netflix tell-alls, exists.

The six-part, nearly five-hour-long series follows Ramsay as he puts the finishing touches to a new restaurant complex at the top of the London skyscraper 22 Bishopsgate. He tells us over and over again it's his most ambitious, riskiest project yet - which I'm sure Sisyphus said about his 108th rock, too. But, as the title would suggest, the documentary seems to be more interested in painting a varnished portrait of Ramsay's personal life. We watch him dote on his young son, take his adult daughter shoe shopping, swim in the sea in Cornwall with his personal trainer, and flirt with reality TV restaurateur Lisa Vanderpump on FaceTime. We're told he has softened in middle age, and it seems as if he actually has. He appears to be a caring father and husband, and if the goal is to soften his image (it is!), then, job done. The fact that it makes for extremely dull viewing doesn't seem to have bothered anyone behind the scenes at all.

The restaurant project, you'd think, should be where the show finds its groove. But it takes almost 90 minutes of screen time before we get to see Ramsay doing the thing he's really, undeniably good at, which is critiquing and shaping his executive chef's work in the kitchen. It is the first and last bit of real tension in the opening two episodes, and it's over far too soon. Before then, we watch him survey the building site seemingly dozens of times, making minor, uninteresting decisions, like whether to smoke the glass that shields the private dining room, or the colour of an exposed beam by the sushi bar. It's clearly meant to convey that Ramsay is a detail-orientated perfectionist, but if the filmmakers were interested in entertainment rather than ego-fluffing, then they'd have lopped at least three hours off the final cut. Instead, the show is so laughably baggy that there is, inexplicably, a detour where the Brummie building site manager, Terry, briefly becomes the main character. "My weekend is spent shopping, really, with the wife," He tells us in a voice-over, as we watch him walk to work. At one point, Ramsay invites a load of food TikTokkers to try out some of the new dishes on the half-built roof terrace, and tries to present influencer marketing as a novel idea (this was filmed in 2024, by the way), one he came up with because he wants to stick it to the critics.

Towards the end of episode one, Ramsay tells a story about the time he kicked the late food critic AA Gill out of his restaurant for calling him a "failed footballer" in a review. It's a good anecdote, sure, but it's a direct reminder of the far superior Channel 4 documentary, Boiling Point (1999), in which you can actually watch the incident unfold. That series followed Ramsay as he attempted to whip his kitchen at Restaurant Gordon Ramsay into good enough shape to win his third Michelin star. It shows us a very different Ramsay - one who is totally fine with bullying and fat-shaming his staff in front of a camera crew. It is, unfortunately, extremely entertaining, in part because Ramsay is too arrogant and lacking in self-awareness to understand how badly he's coming across. At one point, he takes a big paycheque from Bramley apples to do a cooking demonstration, and swaps their apples for Granny Smiths as a "fuck you" to the event's organisers. I'm no shill for Big Apple, but it comes across as snide and cruel.

Being Gordon Ramsay, on the other hand, is painfully self-conscious. Beckham (2023) kicked off this depressing trend of behind-the-curtain docs about celebrities. Since then, we've had Robbie Williams in his underwear pretending to get deep, Victoria Beckham fussing over the weather at her SS25 show, Simon Cowell performing empathy with a new boyband. They all have the same goal - of selling a new project while making the subject look wholesome, family-orientated and, at a push, relatable. Beckham was actually pretty entertaining, because they had the twists and turns of David's football career to go through, and some great talking heads. But these subsequent docs have learned the wrong lesson from it - they all want their version of the Rolls-Royce scene, which momentarily made David and Victoria look like a married couple from a sitcom and launched a thousand memes. Brooklyn Beckham's recent posts on Instagram, which dragged a family feud out into the town square, should remind us that these documentaries - controlled as they are by the subject - rarely show us a complete picture. In fact, they often remove tension, rather than inject it.

There's nothing revealing or memorable about Being Gordon Ramsay. And in truth, this is neither the Ramsay we want, nor the Ramsay we need. Get him back to some shit-stained kitchen in the arse end of Memphis, Tennessee, set him up with a shoddy commis, and hand him two slices of bread. That's where Ramsay really cooks.

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