Jo Wood has just had a tattoo of ex-husband Ronnie’s face removed from her derrière, apparently. Two other well-known faces certainly got perilously close to kissing said posterior in the opening episode of Celebrity MasterChef (BBC1, 8pm, 31 July). She’s about to be a granny for the seventh time, don’t you know? “No!” simpered judges John Torode and Gregg Wallace in unison. “Impossible!”

It was totally toe-curling stuff. But I didn’t switch off. Ronnie hardly looks the best-fed chap in the world - and I wanted to see if Jo’s cooking had anything to do with that.

As it turns out, it didn’t. Hers was some of the best-looking grub produced by the ‘celebrities’. Janet Street-Porter’s tasted good but looked like it had been applied to the plate with a catapult Sugababe Heidi “I just don’t want to look like an idiot” Range mistook her duck for beef and there was something dodgy about comedienne Katy Brand’s crab sauce. But Jo had a “great palate”, as Wallace noted through a gobful of dumpling.

An hour of this was bearable, just. But this is only the beginning. This series is going to go on and on like a nasty case of vibrio vulnificus, that nasty bug you can pick up from badly cooked shellfish.

We have a month of three episodes a week ahead of us, and that’s just the knockout stages. If Brand’s dodgy crab doesn’t lay Torode and Wallace low for a while - to be clear, I’m not talking hospital, just enough to make them think twice about gracing our screens seemingly EVERY SINGLE DAY - please, somebody, knock me out. Please…