Mind the Bollocks

We first see Ed — scruffy, unshaven, wearing a baseball cap — shoveling burgers and fries onto paper plates from a roadside van. But then his life changes. He’s sent down to London to stay with David Laris, a chef at “one of London’s trendiest restaurants,” as the show’s narrator helpfully informs us. Ed’s first task is to cook Laris and his wife dinner. He’s given all the ingredients — a beautiful fish, vegetables, and all the kitchen implements he could ask for. There’s only one problem: He can’t cook. (He can only flip burgers and make beans on toast.) Laris takes one bite of the hideously charred fish and absurdly overdone vegetables (Ed boiled them for an hour) and politely suggests they go for takeout Chinese.

With a lot of hard work, Ed does eventually learn something about preparing and cooking food. He also learns how to make a few dishes good enough to fool the judges. (Duck with cranberry sauce is his specialty.) But his biggest problem is that he can’t bring himself to boss other people around — which, as a head chef, he absolutely must do in order to run a kitchen. So, like every contestant on Faking It, he’s sent off to see an acting coach who teaches him that the fastest way to become the person you want to be is to act as if you already are that person.

But even with the coach’s help, Ed still has trouble being authoritative. Giving orders is anathema to him. And he can’t get used to being surrounded by sleek, successful professionals. From his slacker perspective, they’re like a different species. But in the end, just when you think he’s hopeless, he flips a switch in his head, starts barking out orders, and leads his team of cooks to victory in a cooking competition against three other teams led by realhead chefs. It’s an amazing moment. Ed has been transformed. It seems he does have a giant pair of bollocks, after all. And I doubt he’s still selling burgers.

More Brit TV is on the way with MI-5, which debuts July 22 at 10 p.m. on A&E, and should not be missed. Starring Matthew Macfadyen as Tom Quinn, a broodingly handsome super-spy for Britain’s secret service, this is a show that combines an Alias-like love of gadgetry with taut storytelling and a reasonably convincing degree of verisimilitude, though I’m sure it’s miles away from how spies actually live, work and behave.

No matter. This is a sophisticated, well-written show that moves at a clip and gets you involved in the characters. The politics, it’s true, are of the self-congratulatory, aren’t-we-nice-’n’-liberal kind seen on everything from 24to Law & Order: SVU, but hell, by this point that’s just part of the television landscape. And the amazing thing is how lively, even healthy in spots, the landscape’s looking. Who says there’s nothing good on TV during the summer?