GLORIOUS outcomes in the early rounds of BBC Two’s Celebrity Masterchef. First Matt Dawson, the former England rugby union star, made it to the quarter-finals, narrowly seeing off some vigorous cooking from Tony Hadley, once of Spandau Ballet. Then, only 24 hours later, Roger Black followed Dawson through, the Olympic silver medal-winner emerging victorious from a crowded kitchen containing Arabella Weir, the comedian and author, and some children’s television presenter or other.

For fans at the sports/cookery interface, it doesn’t get any better than that.

When people talk about the “pressure-cooker atmosphere” at this level, they are not merely throwing words around. Dawson’s crispy skinned chicken breasts with garlic mashed potato and truffle cabbage were produced against the clock and under conditions of heat and intensity that he will barely have known as a sportsman.

Black, too, demonstrated that he could up his game when the chips (or, as it may be, the sautéed potatoes) were down. Having slightly disappointed with an early baked sole in butter (not his personal best), the former 400 metres runner’s lemon soufflé with a raspberry sauce was pronounced “dreamy” by John Torode and Gregg Wallace, the Masterchef judges.

Remember that very little impresses those hard men of cooking, who talk a lot about cookery being “tough” and have done everything they can to inject the Masterchef event with testosterone, short of actually being bare-chested in the kitchen (unacceptable on health and safety grounds).

Of course, over-compensatory manliness is all the rage for television cooks, lest anyone watching should confuse an interest in drizzling balsamic vinegar on things with being a wuss. There isn’t a male chef out there these days who doesn’t seem to be trying to persuade the world that he would have been in the SAS if he hadn’t opened a restaurant on the way to the recruitment office. I blame that Gordon Ramsay — although, come to think of it, Fanny Craddock, the founding mother of televised cooking, was nobody’s idea of a pushover.

Anyway, hotter than one has seen him in ages, Hadley took the fight to Dawson with a fillet of beef and some sweet red onions. “Geezer food,” the singer called it. The judges were unhappy. “It’s not all that attractive because it’s all brown,” they said. True enough — for someone so closely associated with the 1980s, Hadley had produced a dish that was, at least in its colour scheme, dispiritingly reminiscent of the 1970s. A power cut, if you will, in a bowl. “Unfortunately, the brie disintegrated on the marmalade,” a rueful Hadley remarked — not a sentence one ever imagined him coming out with back in the days when Spandau Ballet were in their pomp and Hadley was wearing a lot of cheek blusher and his mum’s tablecloth.

The singer attempted to claw his way back with what the judges conceded was “a really well-balanced pudding”, but the damage had been done. Rely on it, though — the man who brought us Gold will be back. He’s indestructible.

Buoyed up and cooking way beyond himself, Dawson, by contrast, earned praise for his “deliciously silky” tuna and “punchy sesame oil”. Don’t you love the way these food people talk? Words ought to fail them, but somehow they never do. “Clean, crisp, modern, exciting — this is the start and foundation of some serious, serious food,” Torode said. Dawson announced himself “ properly chuffed”. Understandably so. An overall victory in Celebrity Masterchef would provide him with exactly the boost he was looking for on the eve of his appearance with Jimmy Tarbuck on Strictly Come Dancing.

People laughed at Dawson a couple of years ago for missing an England rugby training camp to fulfil an engagement with A Question of Sport. They’re not laughing now. As the appearances on celebrity television formats rack up, it’s coming to look like the most career-minded thing he ever did.

He may not have it all his own way in tomorrow’s quarter-final, though. Black, clearly, has another big dish in him. This one could go all the way to the dishwasher.

Giles Smith returns on Saturday