When James Nathan won the hotly contested MasterChef final, he had tears in his eyes. And he wasn’t the only one. On sofas across the country, viewers sobbed as the barrister who gave up everything to pursue his dream of culinary stardom achieved his goal.

“It’s the most exciting competition so far,” judge and chef John Torode declared. “Every year it gets better and better.”

The viewing figures appear to bear him out. Hidden away as it is on BBC2, MasterChef has garnered a growing cult following over the past eight weeks.

By the final last Thursday, 5.7m people had tuned in. This is partly a result of MasterChef’s zippy format.

Contestants must be confident dishing up meals in the jungle for the British Army, toiling in the world’s most demanding kitchens and creating instant haute cuisine from a collection of random ingredients.

There is also pleasure to be found in watching the hyperbole of the presenters. Torode’s USP is taking enormous mouthfuls and weeping if he likes something. His sidekick, the bald and twinkly “ingredients expert” Gregg Wallace, has a repertoire of appreciative grunts and gasps whenever he gets to sink his teeth into a gooey pudding.

Recent tabloid revelations about Wallace’s past as a football hooligan and his penchant (according to his ex-wife) for spanking and ladies of the night have only added to his naughty allure.

MasterChef’s popularity this time around, however, is mostly thanks to the three equally appealing and different finalists: Nathan, 34, a softly spoken hippy-ish type whose mastery of classical French cuisine appeared to rival Gordon Ramsay’s; Jonny Stevenson, 32, a podgy Belfast bank manager and single father who taught himself to cook perfect bistro cuisine in a matter of months; and Emily Ludolf, a wunderkind whose eccentric creations brought tears of joy to the eyes of Torode no fewer than five times. Now 19, she was taking her A-levels during the filming. Naturally, she scored straight As and got into Oxford.

But it was Nathan who carried off the trophy after sailing through challenges including catering for a wedding at Blenheim Palace and creating a meal for a galaxy of top chefs, holding 17 Michelin stars between them. His final, perfectly pitched menu — smoked mozzarella ravioli, tea-infused venison and a chocolate and orange pudding — secured him the title.

“I’d been saving the mozzarella ravioli in case I got into the final,” he said. “But I was really worried the dishes were merely competent, not exceptional enough to win.”

Indeed, Ludolf was in many ways the real star of the series. Although her cooking was more original, however, she didn’t have all the practical skills.

“The competition is about finding someone who can step into any kitchen anywhere and do the job,” said Torode. “And James has that passion in him — he so wants to be a chef.”

The day after the final was broadcast, Nathan pitched up at his parents’ Bristol home, which he was using as his base for interviews. He seemed a little the worse for wear, having spent the previous night carousing at Torode’s London restaurant, Smiths of Smithfield, with his wife, Linsey, and fellow finalist Stevenson.

Ludolf had been unable to join them, as a party was being thrown for her by friends who dressed up as dishes she had cooked on the programme. Given that these included a chocolate mud pie adorned with crystallised tarragon and tagliatelle made from jellied beetroot strips, it must have been a sight worth seeing.

Nathan was feeling disconcerted, having just been hugged by a burly stranger when he stopped to fill up with petrol. “It’s amazing how many huge men watch MasterChef,” he said.

Having been sworn to silence since last September, when the final was filmed, he was finding it hard to articulate his emotions now that he was free to talk.

“I think I’m suffering from post-traumatic stress,” he said. “I still can’t really believe I’ve won — it feels like some huge con. But this could be my passport to the big time.”

Every week in the show’s introduction, Torode promised that “whoever wins, it’ll change their life”.

He is probably right: eight out of the nine MasterChef finalists of the past three years have gone on to careers in food.

The highest profile is the photogenic Thomasina Miers, whose new cookery show starts in mid-March. She has a Mexican restaurant, Wahaca, in Covent Garden and a second opening in November.

“I got enough offers to amaze me after I won,” said Miers on the phone from Mexico, where she is researching new dishes for Wahaca.

“A few people who should have known better asked me to run restaurants for them, which given my lack of experience seemed extraordinary. But winning MasterChef doesn’t make life simple.”

Indeed not. While he was waiting for the final to be shown, Nathan was earning a living working in a garage in Glastonbury, while his wife and their daughter, Sophie, 2, remained in their house in the mountains near Malaga in Spain.

Only now has he been able to capitalise on his efforts. Within 24 hours of the programme’s broadcast, he had secured work with Michael Caines, the Michelin-starred chef at Gidleigh Park, the country house hotel in Devon. Caines had been particularly impressed by Nathan’s turbot in truffle sauce with scallop tripe and chervil cream.

“We’re going to see how we like each other,” said Nathan. “My end goal is to get a restaurant of my own, but I have to learn how to cook like a pro first. It’s all very well being a talented amateur but I can’t manage 15 pans at once. And there’s the business side — how do you order food, how do you run a restaurant, how do you get a Michelin star?”

The family home in Spain will now be sold and Nathan has also discussed plans for a new restaurant with Torode. “Let’s just say, I might invest,” said the professional chef.

For those of us who find getting a family dinner on the table a sweat at the best of times, this determination to join the ranks of the (mostly) poorly paid and over-worked chef brigade might seem a little odd.

“I get an instant buzz from all the equipment and tools in a professional kitchen,” said Nathan. “It’s like the Grand Prix and that gives me a real kick. And my mind is rushing all the time, the only thing I’ve found that absorbs me completely is cooking because you have to concentrate on so many different things at once.

“When I started in the competition, I would set a timer but, by the end, I just knew by instinct when to get things out of the oven. And I could tell from the sound behind me what stage my onions were at. I got really tuned in, psychologically.”

Cooking was a survival strategy Nathan developed in early childhood. “I was the youngest of six children, and my mother had always wanted a boy but only had girls until I came along. So I was the apple of her eye, very much tied to her apron strings. My earliest memories are of being in the kitchen.”

He started off baking miniature loaves to put in his Action Man’s toolkit, then graduated at the age of six to cakes, which he created every Sunday from his Winnie the Pooh cookbook to allay the sibling rivalry of his sisters. “The cakes made everyone so happy. That was really why I enjoyed cooking — I like to please people.”

A career in the law was not the most obvious of decisions, but he did it on the advice of his father, who thought it would give him more options in later life. “But I was doing crime and all I seemed to do was get people upset.”

He shocked fellow pupils by riding through the Inns of Court on his skateboard and, after 2½ years, decided to abandon his career and follow his original ambitions.

“I knew I was going to cook for a living, but I was 33, getting on a little bit. I didn’t know how to super-accelerate myself to the top,” he said.

“One night, Linsey and I were watching MasterChef and she suggested I applied. And that was it.”

Ludolf also applied on the off chance. She had been watching the programme and sneering at the banal dishes the competitors concocted when her sister challenged her to do better.

Her recipes included rhubarb soup topped with a floating coconut cream — “I had to experiment for ages to get the ratios right so it would float” — rabbit with langoustine mousseline and carrot, lemongrass and ginger purée; and chocolate and paprika sorbet.

Dishes were presented to look like mud pies or campfires, explosions of colour and, to judge by Torode’s ecstatic reaction, taste. “You scare me,” he often said. “You’re incredible.”

The rather more conservative Wallace didn’t always enjoy her taste combinations.

“I knew I was taking a big risk,” said Ludolf, now back at Wadham College, where she is studying English literature, “serving up things like my chocolate mud pie. But I’m not worried about looking stupid.

“What I really enjoyed about MasterChef was having the opportunity and freedom to create the dishes I wanted to, without having to think, he’s allergic to this and she doesn’t like that.

“I love cooking and making messes. I’m constantly tasting and nibbling. Cooking for me is a medium for passing on emotions and ideas to other people. I love using random, obscure ingredients, because you can recreate that sensation you have as a child, when you taste something for the first time.”

As a result of her success, her original plans for a career in the media or visual arts have gone on the back burner. “I’ve learnt so much from doing the programme. I’m not going to have a restaurant — I’m messy and disorganised and those characteristics don’t work well in a kitchen environment. But maybe my talent for cooking is something I could follow up.”

She is not likely to have much choice in the matter; some canny chef will snap her up for her ideas alone, let alone her culinary skills. Sian Williams, presenter of BBC Breakfast and the Six O’Clock News and a selfconfessed MasterChef obsessive, deferred her early bedtime by a whole hour to catch every episode.

“What I loved about it was that you saw people grow as personalities, you got to know them and what it’s taken for them to get there. I found the it really emotional. And it’s quite a gentle programme.”

What has been particularly refreshing about MasterChef is how far it diverges from today’s reality TV formula. Even though it is a sudden-death show, in which half the contestants are dismissed after cooking a single dish, nobody is humiliated or screamed at. The writer Frederic Raphael describes it as “the only good arts programme” on television. “You see people who actually have to do something difficult. Everything else is hype-dominated.”

Karen Ross, editor of the series, said: “It was a conscious decision to have one thing on TV that isn’t mean.” And as Torode concluded: Sometimes it’s nice watching real people do something positive.”

Explore Food & Drink

• Gordon Ramsay

• Heston Blumenthal

• Recipes

• Wine

• Real Food

• Anjum Anand

• Eating Out

• Video Recipes

Times Recommends

• How to season a wok
• Chicago Rib Shack hits back at its critics
• Gordon Ramsay: Indian barbecue