The well-worn concept of Ready Steady Cook is a simple one: two teams, each made up of one professional chef and one amateur cook, are each given a bag of random ingredients and have twenty minutes to make three dishes out of them. The studio audience votes on who has done the better job via the display of the famous team symbols: the red tomato and the green pepper.

It’s a bouncy, low-stakes, day-glo kind of format, and Maestre takes to it like a bull to a china shop. As the frenetic shenanigans unfold, he bellows, he guffaws, he leaps about the studio, breaks into spontaneous dances, and urges on the competitors with great gusts of Latin exhortation. Swept up in his tornado of positivity, the audience laughs and claps and cheers, and the cooks behind the counters are driven to muck around far more than other foodie shows would allow, even while they race the clock.

Ready Steady Cook is not a show to be taken seriously, least of all by its own host, who has embraced the format precisely because it removes the seriousness from cooking. “I became a chef at a time when everyone was pretty full on, in the UK, I got called everything with a C or with an M, when I was an apprentice. It made me a strong person and it made me believe what I didn’t actually want to bring to my kitchen.

“I always believe respect is much stronger than fear. And I think the show is exactly how my kitchen was. You know, the salmon is cooked beautifully and the sauce is not splitting, but we’re not saving anyone’s life. We’re having a great time cooking,” Maestre says.

The self-importance of so many TV cooking competitions leaves him cold. “No one cares if the potatoes went on, you know, blah blah, or the foam, or the smoke … I mean, no one cares. People just wanna have fun – a little bit of information but having fun along the way.”

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It’s the philosophy that made Ready Steady Cook an international hit in the early 2000s, and that Channel Ten is crossing its fingers will still resonate today in a time when life somehow seems less carefree than ever. It might make this the perfect time to offer people the chance to sink into the couch on a Friday night and allow the complicated messy world to be reduced to a tomato and a capsicum for an hour.

Whether it’s a hit or not, it’s unlikely to alter Miguel’s approach to everything he does or to dent his worldview.

“I arrived in Australia with broken English, a suitcase full of dreams and empty pockets. And I have never tried to compete with anyone. I was trying to stay true to myself and it worked well for me, because at the end of the day, no one can be more yourself than yourself. It’s not always worked in my favour – I can tell you hundreds of times I have had failures. But maybe for this job … I really did fit the profile.”

Ready Steady Cook is on Ten, Friday, 7.30pm.

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