TIME杂是S团黑！

The Japanese TV show Bistro Smap is an unholy merger of celebrity cook-off and simpering chat show

Twisted I know, but it has always been a fantasy of mine to watch Mikhail Gorbachev being fed grilled eels by a tone-deaf boy band. Last night my dream came true.

In a long history of impenetrable lunacy, yesterday was Fuji TV’s finest hour, a day when it took Japan only 54 minutes (including ad breaks) to lose its last remaining shred of credibility.

Bistro Smap is an unholy merger of celebrity cook-off and simpering chat show, but more vapid than both. Each week a celebrity guest is entertained by SMAP — a fraying boy band so overexposed that at least one of them is clearly insane. The lads split into pairs and cook two rival dinners, and the fifth member interrogates the guest while his colleagues are clanging about in the kitchen. The interviewee must eventually decide which meal he prefers.

Japan has precious little in the way of confrontational journalism. Bistro Smap, God help us, is the closest it gets to Paxman. Shows like this, with their tenacious pandering to celebrity appetites, are why Toyota’s boss will be so comprehensively mauled by the US congressional investigation later today. Cross-examination in Japan tends to involve soufflé.

Acknowledging that Mr Gorbachev was more heavyweight and humourless than the usual guests, the SMAP boys were given an on-screen crash course in Cold War politics before donning their aprons. “Wow,” dribbled the lead singer as a wavy-haired historian described the fall of the Berlin Wall and the demise of the Stasi, “did that mean people stopped writing spy novels?”

By the time they finally got to the interview, the boys were on fire. The repartee sizzled as prancing Japan and monosyllabic Russia discussed the Great Game. The most deranged SMAP member had hidden a small matryoshka doll in his mouth and regurgitated it for the father of Glasnost. “That is not food,” groaned Gorby, visibly regretting that he no longer has nuclear missiles and KGB assassins on the other end of a phone.

“But this eel ... is very good,” he conceded.