The F Word is back. Spurred on by the success of the previous series Channel 4 has decided to serve us more of Gordon Ramsay’s ego-driven vehicle. A suggestion for Channel 4: rename the show ‘Fuck’. Seriously. Firstly, because Ramsay can’t get enough of the word. Secondly, for reasons that I will explain below and have elaborated on before, this show can no longer hide behind the joke that the F is for “food” since it really is all about Gordon and his crazy death cult of cookery. The squeamish among us might demand that it is sanitised with a fig leaf to F*ck for the purposes of pre watershed adverts, but this is not exactly a show that caters for the squeamish or even those moderately easy to offend, bringing me neatly to the third reason for the change: this is a show that is delighting more and more in bearing all to a barbaric and vulgar degree. It’s the Top Gear of the cookery world, full of testosterone, all about the penis, a load of bollocks.

Perhaps if the line between a dead animal and food was a bit thinner we would have more vegetarians. People like their meat but don’t want to know how it got there. That’s not escapist or squeamish, it’s normal, as normal as appreciating your own life without calling on Mum and Dad to demonstrate what they did together to give it to you nine months earlier. Therefore I pre-emptively strike down those who may argue that Ramsay is doing anything other than tailoring some pathetic controversial hard-man of the kitchen routine. The title music had not even finished on yesterday’s show before he waltzed past his audience into his studio/kitchen and slammed the body of a dead deer that he had carried with him onto a work surface with a dull thud, proclaiming in his most yobbish voice: “Right, that’s deer, main course”. What is with this guy?

As with the two previous series there are some subplots that will develop with each show. Number one is his amateur chef competition, where teams of mates cook in his kitchen and have to get as many people to pay for their output as possible. The team with the highest score in this series will have the privilege of running the kitchen at Claridges. Last night would have been entertaining [a few of the Etonians in the kitchen talked back to Ramsay and did not show the jittery tingling fear of the great dictator that previous teams have] if they were not such a noisome cocky bunch themselves.

The second plot continues the theme of parading a group of animals that will be slaughtered in the penultimate show and eaten in the last one. We have had turkeys, we have had pigs, Gordon has had complaints, but undeterred he is now rearing lambs. In time he will name them, focus the camera on them and joke to us, the knowing audience, about how they will soon be dead and in his stomach. Once again, you can claim you love food while staying at least neutral and dispassionate about the animal that’s about to die. Ramsay is goes the extra mile thuggish and ritualistic.

But at least once the animal has been humanely slaughtered we can learn to cook with the master, no? No. Maintaining the tradition established at least since series one in 2005, Ramsay does not fanny about with ladies’ business of quantities, cooking times or describing what he is doing using in more than one or two syllables. It is infuriating. Take this snatch of dialogue from last night, where we watched him cook venison with sweet and sour peppers: “Marinade [with what?], olive oil [how much?], salt [how much?], juniper berries [how many?], - [break to enthuse a little] - garlic [how FUCKING MUCH?], season [WITH WHAT GORDON, WITH WHAT??].” Once the formality of cooking is over with, it’s back to standing hands on hips, chest pushed out, with his boot over nature’s neck. “Time to kill some giant crabs” was the unbelievably crass segue way for a trip to Norway, where he did in indeed set off to kill some king crabs, or as he put it “freakish beasts”. These crabs certainly are scary looking animals, and suffer from the same problem as all non-fluffy, hardy, cold-blooded creatures. As Kurt Cobain may have said, it is OK to eat them ‘cos they don’t have any feelings. But I can’t have been alone in coming down with a case of boiling blood when our brave hero swooped down in his dry suit, plucked one of these crabs that was trying to get away, dragged it onto dry land and then killed it with a sharp pick, all in view of the camera.

There are some rays of light in this show. Janet Street Porter is more likeable than I ever remember, and Gordon’s trip to rid some nurses of microwavable food didn’t annoy me as much as I expected [even though his attempt to show that cooking spicy lemon chicken when you have all the ingredients conveniently located in the kitchen is quicker than getting in a car, buying a microwavable meal and coming back to heat it up was just daft]. But it’s all about him. His silly and infantile posturing, this fixation he has with carrying out what could be pent-up revenge fantasies on animals whose meat tastes just as nice when the camera is not recording their last undignified moments, and this no-nonsense attitude he cultivates which involves him slagging off “rival” chefs for incompetence and/or showing off while he indulges in every type of carnivorous nonsense under the sun.