Got your king scallops yet? If not, it may be too late. Asda has quadrupled its order so you could try there. Lidl may be able to help with the Crunchie bars, but you’ll get blank looks if you ask them for 12 diver-caught marine bivalve molluscs: and without them, not to mention 22 other ingredients and 30 items of kitchen equipment, you will be unable to participate in tonight’s TV Cookalong with Gordon Ramsay.

From 9pm on Channel 4 the great man will be preparing pan-roasted scallops with tomato and herb salsa, steak and chips with a rocket and parmesan salad, and chocolate mousse. He doesn’t want you just to watch, he wants you to cook with him. And what he wants, he gets.

There will be practical problems. Unless you have a TV in the kitchen, you will need to set up a relay system of close friends and family members to pass on Ramsay’s moves: alternatively, you could consider a walkie-talkie, but either way you will miss the essential visual element of the lesson. And while the event itself is harmless, what sort of future does it portend? It’s reprehensible enough that hardly anyone these days can cook without a recipe book, but Gord’s Cookalong heralds an Orwellian culinary dystopia in which no one can boil an egg without the cook police barking identical instructions from identical TV screens in every room in the land.

And will Ramsay, who made his name by reducing previously robust young sous chefs to wobbly jellies quivering under a barrage of verbal abuse, really be content with the one-way nature of TV cookery instruction? It cannot be long before every kitchen telly is equipped with a built-in video camera, so that he can watch the nation curdle its hollandaise and offer words of encouragement through the Dolby Surroundsound: “You useless f****** c***, I said whisk it briskly, not wave at it like a limp-wristed f****** poof. Get out of my kitchen, you slack-jawed f****** cretin. What do you mean, it’s your kitchen? It’s MY kitchen! THEY’RE ALL MY F****** KITCHENS . . . ”

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