It seems Matt Preston will have the last laugh over MasterChef colleague-turned-rival, Marco Pierre White.
In May, Pierre White revealed he quit the Channel Ten cooking show over Preston's comments about his son. "With my hand on my mother's grave, I will get that man," the British chef vowed.
But not all is going to plan.
Last week, Pierre White launched Hell's Kitchen on Seven. The celebrity cooking contest – featuring former Bachelorette Sam Frost, so-called "super nerd" Issa Schultz and One Nation co-founder David Oldfield – debuted with 817,000 city viewers.
By Sunday night, its audience had dwindled to 544,000. This is less than half the 1.29 million who watched The Block, giving Nine the No. 1 show of the evening. It's also below the 622,000 who tuned into Survivor on Ten, One or Eleven. (Ten "roadblocked" the series across its three channels to boost ratings.)
A Seven spokesman told Fairfax Media the show would not be dumped from its prime time slot.
"Marco and the team have delivered a beautifully produced show and our celebrity cooks are only just starting to shine," he said. "It's an excellent program in a competitive landscape."
In 2016, Preston gave an interview to the Kyle and Jackie O radio program. At the time, Marco Pierre White Junior was making headlines for allegedly cheating on his fiance in the UK's Celebrity Big Brother house – and spending around $500,000 of his father's money on drugs and sex workers.
"I think it is that terrible thing when you have kids that go off the rails, how do you deal with it?" Preston said.
"Anyone who has tattoos on their face they normally behave badly, don't they? They have kind of crossed through a barrier at that point."
Pierre White reportedly responded: "The things he said about my son in the British press were disgraceful. No one should ever say that about someone else's children."
Then Pierre White Junior weighed in by tweeting a photo of Preston with penis drawn onto his head.
In a series of now-deleted posts, he fumed: "Matt Preston from master chef has never met me what a c--t if I ever cross paths with the fat f--k I'll slap him up in front of his family ... your a dumb f--k messing with the Pierre white family ... what an ass hole can't wait to watch your career go down the drain [sic]."
The next day, Pierre White Junior apologised for his outburst on – you guessed it – the Kyle and Jackie O show: "I shouldn't have said what I said; I was angry at the time, that's why I deleted [the comments]."
Afterwards, he tweeted a thank you to his hosts – while plugging his new range of sex toys.
Between 2011 and 2016, Pierre White appeared as a mentor and guest judge on five seasons of MasterChef. Before Hell's Kitchen launched, he told Fairfax Media he had "no feud with Matt Preston ... I was brought into a situation; I didn't create a situation."
Referring to the celebrity cast, he joked: "Didn't recognise one of them, not one. As far as I was concerned, I was the most famous person in the room."
Unfortunately, some viewers agree.
"Just like the rest of us, these celebrities don't know who each other are," tweeted one.
"Who are these celebs on HellsKitchenAu?" asked another. "I know Pippa [former Home and Away actor Debra Lawrance] and that's all."
Replying to a tweet describing the cast as "no name celebs", Oldfield said: "Keep in mind, they call us celebs, I've never portrayed myself as such."
So far this year, the Seven network has won nearly all the official ratings weeks, averaging 29.7 per cent of prime time city viewers. While this represents a slight decrease of 0.3 percentage points, compared to the same time last year, Nine is up 1.9 points to 28.1 per cent.
Ten's suite of channels are in third place with 18.3 per cent, followed by ABC's 16.8 per cent and SBS's 7.1 per cent.
By Nine's own measurement, Today has already lost 2017 to Sunrise, given the latter has won more than half of the 40 ratings weeks.
In the five major cities, Sunrise is averaging 294,000 to Today's285,000.
