I hope I’m not the only one deeply unnerved by Knorr’s recent stock pot adverts starring top chef Marco Pierre White. White made a name for himself as the youngest chef to be awarded three Michelin stars and went on to mentor bullying cunt and map faced tyrant Gordon Ramsey. Unsurprisingly these two alpha males have since fallen out, with Ramsey turning himself into a shouty mainstay of crap programming and White retiring in 1999.

White’s seminal cook book White Heat has been cited by chefs like Anthony Bourdain as a totemic work that cut through the nouvelle cuisine fad of the 1990s like the proverbial knife through butter, so it’s not too much of a surprise that Knorr have chosen to use him as the face of their new weird looking jelly stock. But crikey the whole thing comes across like Fred West doing an ad for Asda, or Ian Brady trying to flog you Direct Line car insurance.

White is clearly at best a sociopath and at worst a psychopath. The look of cold, calculating menace in his eyes as he rustles up some grub for the brood of kids I assume are his children is frankly chilling. As his long dark locks fall about his menacing visage one can’t help but be reminded of Charles Manson, which makes the carefree frivolity of the bairns so unbearable. At one point one of the kids sort of nods at him as if to say “this is nice”, utterly unaware that any criticism would probably result in being forced to live in a cupboard for seven years. And perhaps worst of all is his monotone voice over which he delivers in the style of an oddly calm lunatic describing what he’s doing whilst amputating limbs from his still living victim. The whole thing is not simply awful but genuinely terrifying, so until the Suffolk Strangler appears on my telly making a nice bowl of stew with Myleene Klass I’ll stick with Oxo.