CHANNEL 4 has admitted there is something fishy about The F Word, the food show starring Gordon Ramsay: an item showing the celebrity chef spearing sea bass off the Devon coast was faked.

More than 4m viewers watched as Ramsay zipped himself into a rubber diving suit, grabbed a spear gun and travelled 13 miles out to sea to hunt bass, bream and mullet in his first attempt at spearfishing.

“I feel like a f****** action man,” the chef declared as he prepared to demonstrate how it is possible to catch your own food.

“I have got three stunning sea bass,” he boasted as he returned to shore gripping the 2ft-long, freshly speared fish. “I have never caught a fish from a spear and it’s not bad for first time out.”

But Ramsay didn’t catch any fish at all on his trip. The prime specimens he went on to grill with saffron and fennel over an open fire on the beach had in fact been caught by a local expert taken on the trip for that purpose.

“I went in 20 minutes before everyone else to make sure we had fish to put on the barbecue,” said Dave O’Callaghan, a member of the British spearfishing squad with more than 20 years’ experience.

“I caught about four and then Gordon got in and we spent about an hour in the water. When we came back in we threaded the fish onto a stringer and he carried them.

“Put it like this: Gordon Ramsay caught f*** all.”

Dave Thomasson, a spearfish-erman from Bodmin in Cornwall who arranged Ramsay’s trip, admitted: “There was an element of the magic of television in that clip. It looks like he speared some fish. It would have been amazing if he had actually caught something, so we had it all planned. I took him to a particularly good spot and I took someone else along to actually shoot some fish.”

The chef was “swimming at high speed from point to point with a cameraman gasping for breath behind him”, Thomasson said. But he made the beginners’ mistake of not holding still enough to allow the fish to come into range for a successful strike.

After about an hour, they gave up in the knowledge that O’Callaghan already had a good catch, which the production team decided would save the feature and Ramsay would brandish as his own when he emerged from the water. The sequence was then screened last August as part of the second series of the programme.

The discovery of the fake is likely to be an embarrassment to Ramsay who filmed several “action” scenes for the latest series of The F Word, which finished earlier this month.

In the most recent run of programmes Ramsay dived for king crabs in the Arctic ocean and shot rooks in Sussex to make into a salad from their breast meat. He also showed the stunning and slaughter of two lambs that he had reared in his back garden before cooking them in his restaurant at Claridge’s.

The revelation is galling for Channel 4 after a year of gaffes. It was rebuked for attempting to cover up a racist incident on Celebrity Big Brother, and the company behind You Say, We Pay, a phone-in competition on the Richard & Judy show, was fined £150,000 for encouraging viewers to call a premium-rate phone number after a contest winner had been chosen.

Last week Channel 4 conducted an inquiry into The F Word, led by Sue Murphy, its head of features. She has now issued a written reprimand to Optomem, the independent production company behind the Bafta-nominated programme. The channel also apologised to viewers via The Sunday Times.

“Regrettably it gave viewers a wrong impression about Gordon’s involvement in catching the fish,” said a spokeswoman for Channel 4. “The channel takes this seriously. The people responsible understand they have made an error of judgment and they are sorry and regret what they have done. They were under pressure and made a big mistake.”

The admission is the latest blow to the credibility of the television industry after a week in which the BBC was forced to apologise to the Queen for wrongly implying that she had stormed out of a photo shoot.

Ramsay – who has restaurants in New York and London, once appeared naked in The Sunday Times Style magazine holding a conger eel to protect his modesty – was unavailable for comment and his agent forwarded all inquiries to Channel 4.

Last year Ramsay successfully sued the Evening Standard for libel over a report that alleged he had manipulated scenes in Kitchen Nightmares.

“We have never done anything in a cynical fake way,” he said at the time.

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