One of the biggest complaints about Masterchef’s previous series, apart from the bizarre manner in which John Torode says “basil”, was that the structure was apparently wilfully confusing. 

No, it’s not that we’re stupid, honest. We tried our very best but could never get our heads round it. In one week’s mammoth three-night run, there’d be a bunch of people who were at the very first stage, doing ridiculously shit pastry and angering eggy Gregg Wallace, running almost simultaneously alongside a bunch of people sweating away at the industrial kitchen stage, getting shouted at by some barely coherent Scottish man about a piece of salmon.

Things would get a bit simpler each week until, if you’d stuck with it, they announced that it was the final and soon you could have your life back. And then lovely Tim won, which was ace because he was the best ever.

This year, though, it’s all changed. They’ve simplified it to stop our mewling and crying, and there’s less of a focus on the contestants’ back stories (to stop their mewling and crying).

Last week got all the shitty chaff out of the way so that this week we can feast our eyes on plenty of lovely wheat. Which is fine because what we thought was a wheat allergy was just mild liver poisoning from all the Baileys.

Anyway, though, back to that simplifying of format: all three episodes last week were exactly the same. Seriously, we watched all three of them back to back, because we were hung over and there are no new episodes of The Office to legally obtain, and by the end of it our faces had melted into a puddle on the floor. From the invention task opener to the climactic use of that Snow Patrol song that has Martha Wainwright on it, it was like we had fallen into a small tear in the fabric of time.

By the end of the three hours, as well as seriously questioning ourselves in general, we weren’t even impressed by sous-vide cooking any more. The only thing that was remotely different was when John Torode literally ROARED in one man’s face, for no real reason.

Could it be, we whispered, clutching at our Gregg Wallace rag doll, could it be that we actually needed that slightly unhinged structure to keep things interesting? Could it be that actually a bunch of people cooking for three nights isn’t actually that interesting if you don’t have to constantly go “wait, are these new people? Who are they? Why are these guys doing this now?”

It looks like it’s all change tonight, when the 12 (12? We think there’s 12…) hopefuls cook for the Masterchef winners of old. Yes, that means that lovely nerdy Tim with his lovely face and nice hands will be there being all lovely and nice, but it also means bloody stupid Dhruv with his big face will also be there. Hopefully they just edit him out, and put in more of the large Scouse bird, because she was funny.