Masterchef: The Professionals review: Sean Pertwee’s gravel-throated voiceover highlights the wonderful food, and makes you forget Gregg Wallace

The sublime? Sean Pertwee whispering in your ear about celeriac puree, parsnip crisps and finishing with a lamb jus over lingering shots of food that looks like a Monet or a Kandinsky.

Pertwee sounds like he’s been gargling 40 Superkings a day, such is the hoarsely gritty nature of his voice, but allied with the incredible food on the screen he can make you forget you’ve just inhaled a fish finger sandwich on cheap white bread.

It’s fortunate really, because his voiceover distracts from the ridiculous – Gregg Wallace.

While chefs Marcus Wareing and Monica Galetti attempt to summon up some gravitas, Wallace phwoars and waheys his way around the kitchen with his awful puns and wide-eyed, enthusiastic bonhomie.

When Marcus and Monica show the dish they want the competitors to replicate in the skills test, Gregg gurns, goggle-eyed, as if he’s never seen a pan or a carrot.

To be fair, that’s the reaction of some of the young chefs as well, when they are told what they have to cook. But to their immense credit, it’s rare for them to get completely flummoxed by the task in hand, and what they come up with is 20 times better than anything an average home cook could do.

This week’s quarter-final, meanwhile, confronted the five remaining cooks with a food waste caddy filled with stale bread, brown bananas and a couple of potatoes – together with a bottle of milk – and told them to come up with something.

The task’s difficulty was slightly undermined by then giving them a groaning bench full of lovely stuff to help, like fish, sides of meat, fresh fruit and veg and a vast array of herbs and spices.

It still didn't prevent Gregg from making a godawful pun: “We don’t want you to ‘waste’ the opportunity.”

Thanks for that, Gregg.

Although it brought to mind my mum’s bone stew and her reliance on The Shirley Goode Cook Book – oranges steeped in tea was not a favourite – what the four came up with was pretty as a picture.