My Kitchen Rules

Make a restaurant in your own front room. Then take more difficult challenges to determine a winner.

Split into regions, four couples host a dinner party in their own front room. So far, so Come Dine with Me. They're joined by professional judges, and set strict time limits for each course to appear.

The judges both score each course (starter, main, dessert) out of 10, and the fellow couples score the night as a whole out of 10. The week's highest score wins, right? Wrong.

The scores in your living room are just the starter to a number of rounds at "kitchen HQ". Various elimination tests determine one eventual champion.

The original Australia version became such a huge success down under, Sky acquired the rights to broadcast the Aussie show in 2013 for Living. Not only that, a UK version was announced on the same day in the same year on the same channel for a ten episode run in early 2014 at 9pm on Thursday nights. While viewing figures were respectable for a digital channel throughout its run, it wasn't renewed - perhaps because Sky changed its strategy and only imported shows for Living.

After Sky decided not to do another series, Channel 4 picked up the show for a six-week daytime commission. Originally, Steve Jones was contracted to host, but it turned out he was busy presenting Channel 4's coverage of motor racing at time of filming. Prue Leith who was a judge for Great British Menu since its inception, jumped ship from the BBC to test out this new vehicle alongside Michael Caines.

Prue Leith and Michael Caines judged on Channel 4.

Channel 4 were either really ballsy or very foolhardy on their decision to put out their new daytime commission in the extremely competitive 5pm slot, a slot that viewers were already fixated on going for a quizzy type show at this hour for either Pointless on BBC One or The Chase on ITV. Needless to say, both daytime quiz giants buried Channel 4's lifestyle competition show to the depths of the earth as not one of its 30 episodes cracked BARB's Top 30 weekly programmes.

So, you would think that after its absolute massacre the show would be axed right? Actually no, Channel 4 gave it another shot and decided to extend its new run to 40 episodes. The judges were changed for this series as Prue Leith decided to fill in Mary Berry's shoes for the new series of The Great British Bake Off. And Michael Caines? No idea. They were both replaced by Glynn Purnell and Rachel Allen.

This time, Channel 4 decided to air the new series an hour early, at 4pm, opposite ITV's Tipping Point. But sadly, the damage from the previous series had already been done and they decided to shift their remaining two weeks of the run to a lunchtime slot of 1.10pm and it was ultimately axed after the run ended.

Seven Network (Operations) Limited

Hamlin & Jolliffe (2014)

John Robertson and Andy Jones (2016-17)

Sky's sponsorship office sold the show to sponsors:

"Amateur cooking couples with a real flair for cooking will first have to compete in their homes to see who can whip up the most mouth-watering dishes. The judges will then put couples through a series of more complicated challenges catering for the public before facing elimination 'cook-offs' in the studio."

Wikipedia entry

Weaver's Week review (2016)