Filming commenced at 7am sharp on 20^th November 2008 for the little teaser trailers that began airing from January 2009 between programmes on Channel 4 for their new Food Season / The Great British Food Fight. Channel 4 had tasked Stewart Homan of ‘Dream Cars’ to source a DeLorean and the rest was history in the making.

The general premise was to show the chef’s turning up in their respective vehicles.  Four vehicles were originally selected although Hugh’s vehicle never materialised on the day. A black Range Rover Vogue adorned a ‘GORD 1’ licence plate, a 1963 Vespa scooter had ‘Oliver’ on it and for the chef that cooks scientifically it had to be a DeLorean that showed ‘Hesti’ on its plate.

As you can see in the photos below the ‘gag’ was that Jamie had already arrived and then Gordon’s Range Rover turns up and knocks Jamie’s scooter over. This was done cleverly with an invisible chord used to yank the scooter over to make it look like Gordon was being dastardly. The gag looked spot on when shot from the chosen shooting angle.

Earlier in the day I saw Gordon Ramsey and thought, he looks a tad different without his makeup and then realised he was in fact Gordon’s body double.  It turns out that due to the busy schedule the doubles are used for all but the most essential shots and then the real deals turn up to do their bit later in the day.  I left before three of the ‘originals’ arrived on set but pleased with the group shot of the body doubles. I did of course meet Heston Blumenthal who I hadn’t even heard of before.  He is the ideal chef of the group for the DeLorean due to his eccentric cooking approach.  Heston was enamoured with the DeLorean once he saw it as he did not know until he arrived on set that he would be getting out of one on camera. Once he was comfortable with the finer points of the gullwing doors it was his turn to be on camera.  Heston opens the car door, climbs out and spots a fake mark on the stainless steel near where the aerial retracts (and anally as requested by the director) buffs it away with his white tracksuit sleeve. Heston then stands there doing these fake warm up exercises that you might do after having been cooped up on a long trip and gets more and more adventurous with each passing moment to the glee of the film crew with the final few seconds spent re-arranging his tackle (extremely funny and not surprising this didn’t make it through to the final edit).

Overall the whole experience was a real eye opener, especially with the surprise additions of the strobing Knight Rider tail lights, dry ice pouring from the cockpit and thruster on the engine cover which were all added with CGI and done very well. You really appreciate the amount of work and people that are required to pull something off that in its final edited state is only a minute and a half in length.