Blimey opening a restaurant is hard work, but not nearly as much hard work as watching The Restaurant Man.
Airing on BBC2 at 8pm every Wednesday, the programme casts a distinctly "abandon hope all ye who enter" aura upon those hoping to open their own restaurant or gastropub.
Each week Restaurant Man, Russell Norman by day, meets a new group of hopefuls trying to start their own business.
I have to admit that half the pleasure of watching this comes from trying to decide which budding restaurateur will snap first and push Russell into an oven if only to stop him trampling their dreams.
They meet on the first day eyes wide with enthusiasm hoping to glean as much wisdom as they can from Restaurant Man who wanders in like a culinary Zorro wearing only his world weary scowl as a disguise.
Flash forward a couple of days, wherein Russell has crunched the numbers and taken a look at their business model, and watch the cheery dispositions wither. It took all of fifteen minutes last week for the hopefuls to start looking like they'd witnessed an atrocity.
What sets this apart from something like Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares is that Russell helps new businesses start off with good habits.
By instructing people on how to set up a successful floor plan or how to win the customer service game, he ensures that Mr Ramsay will never have to be called in to give everyone a good old fashioned verbal kicking.
Now there's a show I'd watch, Good Kitchen/Bad Kitchen. Like the old good cop/bad cop routine but in this show, liable to be picked up by Channel 5 any day now, new restaurateurs have both Russell and Gordon over their shoulder simultaneously.
Russell, the good cop, would gently persuade you to reconsider your business model to take into account the price of meat in soothing tones. However, whenever Russell stopped to take a breath Gordon would burst in firing off expletives and knocking your pots over, just to keep you on edge.
Unfortunately my emails to the BBC Commissioning Editor have gone largely ignored, so in the meantime tune into BBC 2 tonight at 8pm for the next best thing.
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