In the last week, if a television program has been in the spotlight, it has been MasterChef. It was just over a week ago when the culinary competition became involved in controversy after Tamara’s abandonment and Jordi Cruz’s controversial attitude. Now, several former contestants, such as Pablo Pérez, from the third edition, have taken the opportunity to dismantle some of the program’s lies in a report published in the newspaper El País.
The participant in the third edition of the contest has criticized the TVE format on several occasions on its networks, and now he has done so again, but this time to denounce the change it has undergone over the course of the editions. Pérez does not hesitate to point out what happened with the famous ‘Lion eats shrimp’ as the turning point that made the contest stop being a contest and become a reality show.
“The 14 remaining contestants were very affected, crying for everything that had happened on set. And even a quarter of what happened was not seen on the screen. They put us in the room where we take breaks and, in the middle of that deathly silence, one of the bosses told us, smiling and applauding: ‘What a program you have given us!’”, she explains to El País in her last interview.
Pablo told what he experienced firsthand in the contest. “Alberto (the young contestant who presented that dish) was crying his eyes out and I saw the people responsible for the program dancing with joy and saying that they were going to get rich from what had happened to him,” he said in the interview.
“From the program they deny the undeniable. You could hear them telling the judges over the earpiece which contestant they had to expel, but they kept telling you that it wasn’t like that,” he continued, assuring that everything is planned. “You think they’re going to take care of you and you end up feeling like shit, with everyone talking down to you,” he expressed.
The contestant assures that “the production company seeks to bring the viewer into conflict with the contestants.” “It exposes anonymous people to public ridicule. They gave me the label of crybaby and it caused me a series of criticisms that affected my family. What need? ”He said, about his personal experience there and the way he felt.
“There is no right for them to use people to make a spectacle of themselves by ridiculing them. People who have done the casting this year tell me that they no longer give you gastronomic tests like we did, but rather camera tests and that you tell them your life, even if you don’t know how to cook. The difference in what the program is looking for now is very clear,” she was honest.
On the other hand, it reveals another fact that was unknown, and that is that Shine Iberia keeps 20-25% of the income that contestants receive from image rights if they participate in other contests or reality shows. “MasterChef is still a business from which they have to make a profit, the problem is that they achieve it with budgets from a public channel,” says Pablo.
Finally, another piece of information that has come to light is that the program would not be as involved in mental health issues as it claims to be. According to the contest, since the suicide of Verónica Forqué the protocols have been increased, and the production company has always defended that they have a team of psychologists who follow the day-to-day life of the contestants. Something that Pérez now dismantles. “My last week in the contest I was psychologically destroyed and I didn’t have that kind of assistance,” he said.
