“I'M A CONTROL FREAK”

The king of culinary TV, Gordon Ramsay, is serving up Master Chef Australia’s 12th season and its three new judges. A dad again at 53, he tells Susan Horsburgh about freaking out in the delivery room, his caveman image, and trying to raise normal kids, despite the family fortune.

- Susan Horsburgh

Gordon Ramsay wants to make one thing clear: the only reason he didn’t witness the births of his first four children was that his wife banned him from the delivery room. “Tana didn’t f*cking want me there!” says the 53-year-old celebrity chef. “And all of a sudden [I’m] denounced as this oaf.”

When the couple’s fifth child arrived last April, however – 17 years after their fourth – Gordon wasn’t taking no for an answer. “I said, ‘F*ck it, I’m going to be there’,” he says, and Tana happily gave in. Now Gordon wishes she hadn’t – because he was out cold within seconds of Oscar’s arrival.

Gordon remembers putting on some calming Ed Sheeran in the operating room, but then the bloody reality of a C-section proved too much for him. He fainted for the first time in his life, just as the nurse was handing him his newborn son.

“It was hot in there, there was no air-conditioning, and the floor looked like the middle of a f*ckin’ abattoir,” he recalls. “I’m not good at that stuff. I know my strengths and that was my weakness.”

It seems a rare moment of humility from the king of culinary TV, a chef who has trained under some of the world’s best, and built a global empire of eateries from England to Italy and the US, collecting Michelin stars with his talent, drive and formidable perfectionism. “I’m a control freak,” he says. “I put my white jacket on and there’s no compromise.”

It’s his foul mouth and fiery temper, though, that have scored him fans on reality TV, starring as gastronomic adjudicator on shows like Hell’s Kitchen and Kitchen Nightmares – entertaining and appalling viewers in equal measure.