Perspex Soup. Wind and Pineapple Biscuits. Absinthe and Dildos. One of these is genuinely on the menu in Heston Blumenthal's Feast (Tue, 9pm, C4), which is without doubt the most mental cookery programme you'll ever see, unless you're in the habit of necking six LSD tabs on a weekend morning and staring at Saturday Kitchen until James Martin's face turns into a singing horseshoe in space.
I've decided I very much like Heston Blumenthal, who recently seems to have become the most omnipresent of all the TV chefs. Unlike the others, he doesn't scream at failing restaurant managers or tut at overweight schoolkids. He doesn't even pretend to teach the viewer to cook. He just does demented things with food, clearly enjoying himself as he does so. He's the culinary equivalent of Wilf Lunn, the mustachioed "mad inventor" who used to show up on kids' TV in the 80s, demonstrating various self-built Heath Robinson devices which performed some abstract function for a few minutes before exploding in his face. There's something scary about both of them: a true lunatic's glint.
This new series is the best showcase for Blumenthal's talents so far. In Search Of Perfection, the BBC2 show in which he set about anally creating "perfect" burgers and so forth, was too prissy, while Big Chef Takes On Little Chef came across as awkward. In Feast, however, he's merely required to create the most preposterous dishes possible.
That's the full extent of the format: Heston researches and cooks something absolutely psychotic, then serves it to a table full of celebrity guests (fittingly, a weird selection, encompassing Richard Bacon and Rageh Omaar). It's like a special edition of Come Dine With Me hosted by the unhinged artisan murderer from the movie Se7en.
Each week there's a vague overall historical theme (this week, the Victorian era), but that's really only a springboard to inspire Heston to do something daft and usually quite frightening. And he really does go above and beyond in his quest to create mad food; at times it borders on insane ritualistic behaviour. At one point this week, he cheerfully boils a cow's head in a pan, reduces it to a concentrated stock, then freezes the resulting fluid into the shape of a fob watch before serving it to his guests in a tea cup. He also deep-fries a mealworm and injects it with mayonnaise.
And then there's the dildos. For dessert, Heston decides to serve an outsized jelly with terrifying sexual overtones, which means spending an afternoon experimenting with gelatine and vibrators in a Hoxton sex shop. The jelly itself contains absinthe. Rather than just pouring a load in, he first travels to France to have a drinking contest with an absinthe expert, to discover whether the drink will, as rumoured, induce visions. Some way into the boozing session he looks confused and turns to camera.
"I've got no hallucinations yet," he says unsurely, "but I always think bananas taste better with three-legged cows in a vegetable shop." I had to rewind and check three times: that's what he says, word for word, with no further explanation offered. Shortly afterwards he announces he can't drink any more and goes to bed.
This really is one of the most creative shows I've seen in quite a while; not in the construction of the programme itself (which takes the familiar "mission" format to provide a fairly spurious narrative), but in Blumenthal's inventive craziness. It's basically a bloke deliberately dicking around to extreme effect for an hour, dabbling in a weird form of art, seeing how far he can go. Halfway through, I realised why this was so refreshing: you very rarely see such genuinely ingenious and imaginative processes being followed this clearly on TV. Each course Blumenthal serves is like an edible Python sketch: meticulously constructed and very, very silly.
There's absolutely no need for this show to exist, or for old Mad Specs the Chef and his helpers to put so much effort into it. But it does, and they do. It's daft and great. Hooray for this.