I KNEW Star Bistro’s Pimm’s Summer Fruit Jelly would make it to the final of Food Glorious Food - or Flop Glorious Flop as it’s been dubbed after disastrous ratings (ITV1, 24 April, 8pm).

It had all the right attributes to tickle British tastebuds - it was pretty, wobbly and contained loads of booze and sugar (oh, and some guilt-assuaging fruit). Better still, it had been created by a team of disabled students fronted by the formidable Joe, so had a more compelling back-story than most in Simon Cowell’s X Factor-meets-The Apprentice offering. And crucially, it had M&S written all over it.

Unfortunately, it was up against schoolteacher Rahila’s white chicken korma - and it turns out that in the battle between jelly and curry, we Brits prefer the latter. It didn’t help that before 10,000 samples of each dish were put to a public taste test, the jelly recipe was ‘tweaked’, with mostof the alcohol removed - a move that was understandable but rather undermined its USP. Feisty Rahila, on the other hand, got the development team to recreate a pretty close approximation of her late mother’s recipe.

Ads for both were made ahead of the unveiling of the winning dish, but once you saw the M&S versions, you feared it was game over for Star Bistro. So it proved. And the same looks to be the case for Food Glorious Food, which, for all the contestants’ charm, is not expected to get a second outing - its hackneyed format, naked commercialism and the ever-irritating Carol Vorderman clearly leaving a bad taste in people’s mouths.