As a reachable audience, 13 million is the envy of all in terrestrial TV. Compare it to, say, Ant & Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway, one of Britain’s highest-rated shows. That gets around 8 million viewers. And it will cost hundreds of thousands of pounds per episode to make.

So don’t you worry, the maths of Brooklyn’s enterprise work out just fine. He can name his price for advertising or sponsoring those slots, if he wants to. Capitalism is operating perfectly healthily there. If only all broadcasting had such a profitable cost-income ratio. The newspapers that are hammering him definitely don’t!

The other allegation in this tidal wave of snide critique (a snidal wave, if you will) is that the programme is terrible and Brooklyn’s an idiot. I think this is a profound mistake. The press want it to be true and they’re seeing what they want to see, like an emperor in a fairy tale.

Is he a magnificent chef? Probably not. Maybe he is, but probably not. I don’t know and it doesn’t matter. Viewers can’t taste the dishes they’re seeing on screen. I know Heston Blumenthal is a great chef because I’ve eaten at The Fat Duck and it was a sublime, mind-blowing experience, even though I was secretly pregnant and turned down some of the most extreme shellfish and vodka selections without explanation. (“I’m desperately sorry,” I told the maitre d’, shamefully. “Don’t worry, Madam, we’re used to it,” he said. “We’ve had Americans in.”)

But I wouldn’t want to cook Heston’s food and I’m not going to eat Brooklyn Beckham’s – and nor are the other 13 million viewers. So it’s about entertainment. Can he do it? I know he can, because I’ve seen the cooking videos he made with Vogue on YouTube. They are quite appetising culinarily, and they’re daft and funny, and he is definitely in control of the joke.

Watch him declare confidently that he will be making “pasta in a cheese wheel”, then sweating profusely as he struggles to slice open the cheese, and tell me he isn’t on top of this. He’s not Heston Blumenthal, but he knows he’s not Heston Blumenthal and he’s playing beautiful-and-naïve like Marilyn Monroe. As with Marilyn, it’s true but it’s not true. It’s authentic but it’s knowing. And it’s definitely fun to watch.