Have we had our fill of TV chefs?

Women's Editor Christen Pears reports.

WHEN tucking into our takeaways or ready meals, there's nothing we like more than sitting down and watching the professionals at work in the kitchen. Turn on your television set over the next few days and you're bound to find yourself watching a cookery programme at some point.

On Saturday morning, BBC2 serves up Kitchen Invaders and Saturday Kitchen. During the week there's a daily helping of Ready Steady Cook. Floyd Uncorked is showing on Channel 5, while Tony and Giorgio, the latest addition to the celebrity chef canon are on BBC2. Those with digital or cable TV can fill up on old favourites such as the River Caf Cookbook, Masterchef and Two Fat Ladies on UK Food - a channel devoted entirely to the delights of cooking - and that's a quiet week.

It seems the celebrity chef is everywhere, but is our appetite for cookery programmes becoming sated? Delia Smith thinks so. Earlier this week, the media reported that the doyenne of TV cooks was stepping out of the limelight. She was simply "reciped out" and wanted to concentrate on her first love, Norwich City Football Club.

Although she later denied this meant retirement, she did indicate she thought the days of the celebrity chef were numbered. She said: "What's happened to the amateur cook in the country house? Or that lady down the pub who only the locals knew about and who cooked up a storm? Now everyone wants to be on TV. The bubble will burst, I know it will."

Both Jamie Oliver and Nigella Lawson had disappointing sales for their latest books at Christmas, while viewing figures for Nigella's latest series, Forever Summer, were lower than expected.

North-East born chef and food consultant Ian McAndrew believes this is an indication we have reached saturation point."There are so many cookery programmes on television now, and so many of them are the same, that people are just getting bored. It can't go on indefinitely, especially as so little attention is being paid to the food.

"I read a piece in the Evening Standard in which Delia said she didn't think she was any good at the entertainment side of things, which is what it all seems to be about these days. She is a bit too strait-laced but she has always been about food and informing people."

Delia isn't cheeky like Jamie or wanton like Nigella, she's more like a culinary Julie Andrews, wholesome and homely. She's been described as the Volvo of British cooking - reliable but unadventurous. But a Delia Smith recipe never fails and that's why people have bought more than ten million of her books.

When she made her first series for the BBC in the 1970s, interest in home cooking was declining as people turned to takeaways, supermarkets and new-fangled ready meals. Her cookery course offered simple and achievable recipes, and her programmes and books had an enormous impact. When Delia cooks something on TV, everyone rushes out to buy the ingredients. Her famous Chocolate Truffle Torte led to a nationwide shortage of liquid glucose.

But her simple, unadulterated style has been abandoned by the new generation of TV cooks. Viewers are no longing tuning in to watch food being prepared, they're buying into a lifestyle, whether it's Jamie's loft and scooter existence, or Nigella's middle class, urban domesticity.

"I think people liked that for a while but things have to go in a different direction now," says Ian. "Personally, I would like to see food being taken more seriously. There are so many issues out there like GM crops, BSE and organic produce, but no one seems to be talking about them. I think producers need to credit people with a bit more intelligence."

There are certainly signs people are becoming bored with TV chefs. The phenomenon receives satirical treatment in the forthcoming BBC2 programme, Posh Nosh, starring Arabella Weir and Richard E Grant as a modern-day Fanny and Johnny Cradock.

"All that plethora of cookery shows really does is make me feel insecure," Arabella said in a recent magazine interview. "They don't make me think, 'Oh, what a great thing to do with scallops and chives,' I just think, 'Oh God! I'm just a fat oaf who lives in a horrible kitchen!"

Perhaps the best illustration of our growing dissatisfaction is the career of Jamie Oliver. He was only 22 when the first series of the Naked Chef was broadcast, turning him into a culinary superstar. His cheeky Essex boy charm and relaxed cooking endeared him to millons but, after five years and four television series, his 'Mockney' accent has begun to grate.

But is it a sign of the demise of the celebrity chef or will Jamie and his contemporaries simply be replaced by a new batch?

The TV cook certainly isn't a new phenomenon. The first ones hit our screens in the 1950s - Marguerite Patten, Philip Harben and the inimitable Fanny and Johnny Cradock. It's easy to mock Fanny's evening dress, full make-up and fussy, franglais recipes, but she paved the way for the personalities and eccentrics who have since appeared on our screens.

In the decades that followed, we were introduced to Galloping Gourmet Graham Kerr, Keith Floyd, Gary Rhodes and, of course, the Two Fat Ladies zooming around the countryside on a motorbike and sidecar and cooking up dishes with improbable amounts of butter and cream. Ainsley Harriot, the ebullient presenter of Ready, Steady Cook, has shown how TV chefs have to become even more whacky to attract attention.

Even the less obviously eccentric have carved out niches for themselves. Rick Stein has cornered the market on fish, while Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall is an ambassador for organic produce.

Pete Zulu, the North-East's own celebrity chef, thinks it can carry on. The former Toy Dolls vocalist has worked in restaurants across the region, as well as presenting his own cookery programme on Tyne Tees. He believes people tune into TV cookery programmes because they're aspirational in the same way as DIY programmes.

"People like to watch these things because they would like to be able to cook like that themselves or have a kitchen like that. I'm not sure how many actually go off and make the recipes. Most of them probably have a plate of chips.

"It doesn't really matter as long as they're being entertained. They like to watch Delia Smith or Jamie Oliver and, if they get bored with them, there are plenty of others waiting to get on screen."