Surfing the Menu

Apparently this show has played to a wider audience on the ABC, but I must have missed that in my desperate attempts to get away from anything even remotely resembling a reality TV show.

It’s a common successful formula being employed here; take people from a faraway place and put them somewhere they’ve never been before – Australia. Even though these guys are Australian, they just haven’t been where they go in this show before. In this way the viewers can experience the travelers’ awe firsthand as it largely overshadows their own. Here we get two ex-pat chefs in Ben and Curtis who travel about the country cooking stuff for people in various places and trying to look cool by surfing dismally.

Even if they are all Aussies, I’d prefer they give us a couple of ocker blokes running around in footy shorts, showing us how you deep fry vegemite sandwiches before having a beer drinking contest. These English-like guys barely touch their light beers before showing us how to dress a pile of grass on a plate. (You use vinaigrette, whatever that is). Where are the pies? Where are the prawns on the barbie? (Actually they do use this well-worn cliché - however, I have yet to attend a real barbeque in which someone has thrown prawns on the barbie. Maybe it’s just me or I have crap friends, I dunno).

Anyway, there are eight episodes here of these lads wandering across the country in true reality TV style, ad-libbing painfully for the camera when not cooking (as to the scripted parts, well let’s just say these guys can cook real good).

We travel to some pretty remote Aussie locales here, which is actually nice to see, rather than just the suburbs of Melbourne or the trite locations like Uluru or the Daintree. Each episode runs around the 26-minute mark and features a new vista each time.

• Broome
  
• The Abrolhis Islands
  
• New Norcia
  
• The Margaret River
  
• Tasmania
  
• The Bellarine Peninsula
  
• The Hunter Valley
  
• Byron Bay
  

Well, for a two-disc set, the discs here haven’t delivered as well as they might have. There are often compression artefacts that translate as macro-blocking, although there are little to no film artefacts apparent. Mostly the video quality is quite sharp with a nice clear picture and richly saturated colours that really bring the various locations to life.

Blacks are natural and shadow detail fluctuates between good to bad; particularly indoors in poorly lit kitchens. Here too we suffer some graininess, but this isn’t as bad as it might be thankfully. I’ve seen worse, anyway. Presented here in the TV ratio of 1.78:1 and 16:9 enhanced, the overall picture is nice and clean regardless of the incremental quibbles within. Still, it’s presented as two DVD 5’s rather than one DVD 9. What’s up with that?

Well, it’s TV so it’s Dolby Digital stereo. This does the trick and doesn’t deliver anything extraordinary, but why would it? Dialogue is (as noted) occasionally stilted and sometimes awkward, but is otherwise understood readily enough. Music is the usual fare, experimenting with clichéd backing like acoustic guitars and such most of the time with the occasional live performance thrown in for good measure. Sound effects are all recorded onsite of course and are well synched to the action without any lag. An average, unremarkable audio package that does its job perfectly, but in a very ordinary manner.

No garnish here folks. No entrées, no apéritifs, no snacks, no hors d’oeuvres and no desserts. Surfing the Menu indeed. It should be called Surfing the Mains and That’s All.

I remain entirely unenthused by this travelogue cooking show. The characters, while genuine, seem to have real trouble ad-libbing although they are apparently good friends. The Curtis dude has turned up on a really, real reality show called My Restaurant Sucks or something, so I guess ‘moderately good-looking with a knowledge of cooking’ gets the jobs these days, not ‘extremely talented Australian chef who lives in Australia.’ That’s life, I suppose.

If you enjoyed the show, then no doubt you will enjoy the two-disc set here in which Curtis and Ben (appallingly nicknamed Bender) cruise the country creating their gourmet masterpieces with local flavour and flair. If you’re in the market for a cooking show on DVD you might enjoy this, but I felt the overall presentation disappointing with little by way of decent content and a pretty empty DVD presentation.