Celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay currently hosts Hell’s Kitchen
OVERDONE: Hell’s Kitchen tormentor-in-chief Gordon Ramsay is being sued by a midtown Manhattan restaurant that volunteered for one of his rather violent makeovers in the American version of his popular UK show Ramsay’s Kitchen Makeovers, according to a story in the New York Post yesterday.
“The show is … a prime example of Fake TV, with viewers, advertisers and participating restaurants and their personnel being willfully deceived … into believing that Ramsay is curing restaurant problems,” said the lawsuit, which is being brought against Ramsay by Martin Hyde, the former manager at Dillon’s, an Indian-American restaurant in New York City. Hyde claims he was made the scapegoat for the restaurant’s problems before being fired on-camera, and claims that Ramsay staged much of what were supposed to be the restaurant’s problems, as well as its success after his intervention.
Hyde’s suit mentions incidents with a broken chair as well as some rotten meat that Ramsay planted for the show, the latter scene ending with Ramsay chasing diners out of the restaurant before shouting “Tell the customers to consider themselves lucky! I have just saved their lives!” Ramsay has declined comment on the lawsuit, which has been launched months before the show is supposed to debut on Fox. Hyde says he was singled out for humiliation, being forced to crawl after a cell phone that Ramsay threw on the ground, and became the subject of insults such as “When I go for a s___, you are the little bit of s___ I just can’t get out!”
Heh. I’ve got to use that sometime.
THE LONG TREK BACK: It’s been almost two years since Star Trek left the small screen after running continuously in one form another for 18 years. Such entities don’t die easily, and production on a new Star Trek movie, to be directed by Lost creator J. J. Abrams, starts this summer, with a tentative release date set for Christmas 2008. This has kicked off speculation that a hit film might revive Trek on TV within a year, especially if the environment for sci-fi on TV remains as favorable as it is now.
Any new Trek would have to be radically re-worked, a la Battlestar Galactica, according to a source at CBS, the owner of the show’s TV rights. “It’s impossible to look down the road on what could be in the works for networks two and three years out,” this unnamed source told SyFy Portal, “but space-faring shows have changed too much to see a return of a traditional Star Trek series.”
“A Star Trek series could end up on CBS,” added the source, “or it could end up somewhere else. But likely, if it comes anywhere back to network television, it will end up somewhere like The CW.” Wherever it ends up, at least one thing won’t change – its biggest fans will still be pitiful geeks who’ll scrutinize the show’s Klingon grammar and gloat if they find a mistake.
