Celebrity MasterChef (BBC One, Wednesday, 17 June, 8pm), like The Internet, is a very serious business… for absolutely no reason. Both of these things require participants to get overly passionate about things that don’t really matter too much to the point where it resembles an OCD. People get scalded online by the grammar police, so too in the kitchens of TV, people are slapped with a heavy hand because the broccoli doesn’t quite go with the prawns. One step back to breathe and you realise that it’s all a bit silly really. However, it’s because Celebrity Masterchef takes itself so incredibly seriously that we enjoy watching it. It’s almost camp in the determination to be respected by everyone else. The snare skin tension of the music, the cold, hard stares of Torode and Wallace and the exam room dread of the room in which the celebrities cook all add up to a delightfully ludicrous show in which the winner gets little more than a crap trophy.

Related: More Masterchef stuff here

So, in the second week of this new series, we saw more wrung hands, furrowed brows and high talk, this time, from Rav Wilding, Deena Payne, Iwan Thomas, Colin Murray, Janet Ellis and Simon Shepherd. They all stepped into a world of exacting tastebuds and blank Teddy Bear eyes.

That said, this new series of the show seemed to be lacking in heart. I’ve always enjoyed the jolly fat man routine that Gregg Wallace does, especially when faced with a pud, leaving Torode to be the more ruthless of the two. This year, they’ve both looked a bit frazzled, like they’re tired and grumpy with the whole world. John Torode has visibly sallowed whilst talking to people.

Mercifully, last night, they seemed a bit less expectant and much warmer, with our Greggles saying: “We’re not expecting Michelin-star cooking,” just don’t balls it up. And so, we sat through people cooking stuff and saying how much pressure they were under and that now they’ve got a taste for it, the competitive streak is growing and enveloping… yadda yadda yadda… you know the drill by now.

So familiar is the format that I’ve found myself watching it on auto-pilot, only truly stirred when something weird happens. One such thing revolved around London restaurant Gilgamesh. Now, Gilgamesh looked like the endgame in some lame ’80s action fantasy thriller. I fully expected to see the assembled celebrities emerge from behind a pile of gargoyle cadavers, bloodied and bowed facing up to some gnarled insect royalty in a red cape and a machine gun attached to its arm. Sadly, all we got was a head chef who was the biggest self congratulatory idiot I’ve seen in some time. Cooking happened. I dreamt of films that don’t exist.

This over-familiarity I’m breeding isn’t helped by the fact that the contestants on the show seem to have started to rehearse certain lines before they appear on the show. Instead of spontaneity, like we’ve seen in the past, most notably with That One From Atomic Kitten Called Liz Who Won, we’re now getting non-committal clichés like you’d see a dull Premier League footballer say. “Y’know, uh, I’ve given it my all and that’s all I can ask of myself,” and “I gave it my best shot.”

Boke.

Again, as the food is generally pretty uninspiring in these rounds, I found myself waiting for the disaster, in the same way you wait for the car-crashes in the early stages of The X Factor and the like. And so, to Iwan Thomas – wacky and slightly dim – who was put through ahead of a perfectly decent cook with the weirdest looking thing I’ve seen since The Green Pancake. He made a burger. He then hid his burger in a thick hedge of lettuce. Seriously. It looked like a den for a bunch of toddlers with dirty knees.

He then did a lap of honour around the kitchen. Sadly, he didn’t trip up and fall head first into the cutlery drawer.

I hate to say this, but so routine is Celebrity Masterchef is that I felt a bit bored of it last night. It made me yearn for the non-sleb version, where we’re treated with a competition that will actually change someone’s life as opposed to make a celebrity better at cooking. That’s what’s a stake here… pride… and we need something more than that or else it feels a bit like an exercise in vanity.