(Top left) Mary Berry in “The Great British Bake Off”, (bottom) Keith Floyd, (right) Amy Schumer and Chris Fischer.

MacArthur Park is melting in the dark,
All the sweet green icing flowing down.
Oh, someone left the cake out in the rain.
And I don’t think that I can take it,
Cause it took so long to bake it,
And I’ll never have that recipe again.
Oh, no, oh no.
(“MacArthur Park,” Jimmy Webb)

Down the YouTube rabbit hole again, I’m looking for recipes for my tea. I stumble across yet another version of Jimmy Webb’s “MacArthur Park.”

In the music video of the Mancunian punk-poet Dr John Cooper Clarke and Hugh Cornwell’s interpretation, Cooper Clark bakes a cake. Yes, the cake is complete with green icing and a red love heart, and Clark is the type of home chef that uses generic Tesco flour.

An episode of “This Is Your Life” featuring my favourite television chef, Keith Floyd, brought me here. In it, Cornwall appears and shares how, in the early ‘70s—while studying biochemistry at Bristol University—he sang for free food in one of Floyd’s three restaurants.

Cornwall’s former band, The Stranglers, was one of Floyd’s favourites. Floyd’s shows are peppered with tunes like “Viva Vlad” and “Peaches,” and “Waltzinblack” is used as the theme for “Floyd on Food.”

Keith Floyd is my kind of chaotic television chef: sipping on wine, talking without pretence to the crew, and nonchalantly wiping foggy cameras down with filthy tea towels.

In the “Floyd on Africa” series, he is cooking squid, onions and peppers on board a boat, when the table catches fire. He recites “Casabianca”—“the boy stood on the burning deck”—as the captain calmly lowers a bucket down the side, gathers sea water, douses the fire, and sensibly places a chopping board under the portable gas stove.

He forgets to add the spinach, but Floyd ploughs on with a Popeye anecdote, and explains it away by assuming the crew don’t like it in their breakfast anyway.

That laissez-faire approach to the genre continues in the contemporary iso-cooking show, “Amy Schumer Learns to Cook.”

The American comedian makes the cocktails while her chef husband, Chris Fischer, cooks, and their nanny, Jane, operates the camera.

Maybe they are forging a new leisure-wear fashion for lifestyle shows too, appearing in loose t-shirts and tracksuit pants. The food is heavy on comfort too: Italian-railway-station inspired speck sandwiches, chicken wings, guacamole and chocolate-peanut-butter-cup cookies.

Late night snacks also feature, like new varieties of toasted sandwiches, so many embellished with Chris’s hardy ‘erb, fennel.

Gorged now, I crave something light. My YouTube searching leads me to the “The Mighty Boosh”, where Vince Noir and Howard Moon are in the Desert of Nightmares, buried in sand up to their necks, reminiscing about better times eating soup:

I am gazpacho.
Oh!
I am a summer soup.
Mmm.
Miso, miso!
Fighting in the dojo.
Miso, miso.
Oriental prince in the land of soup!
(“Fountain of Youth” Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt)

Somehow, Vince Noir survives and lives to sup soup another day. Which allows Noel Fielding, who plays Vince, to then become the co-host of “The Great British Bake Off.”

Any mention of “Bake Off” requires a Mary Berry moment, so I now find myself watching clips of the former judge in earlier incarnations.

Mary Berry in the 1970s British afternoon shows is sizzling chicken fat and beef dripping instead of modern extra virgin olive oil; she’s making me liver, pork and beef mince to form a meatloaf.

Crème Brule, sherry trifle, a pre-Easter Simnel cake – that’s what’s cooking; baking brown bread is exotic. Tonight, though, I settle on Mary’s recipe for home-made ice cream. I’m already salivating, but also worried my paste won’t be rich and thick enough to stop it crystallising.

YouTube is throwing myriad possible sugar hits at me, and I’m overdosing. Mary Berry could make her ice cream and sell it in the ice-cream vans The Stranglers’ drummer Jet Black owned before he joined the band. Still, I need actual sustenance and some real culture—culture like the cheese in Mary Berry’s Stilton soup.

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My culture arrives as the main course: the 2005 BBC series, “ShakespeaRe-Told.” The Bard’s “Macbeth” is re-imagined in a Michelin three-star restaurant.

James McAvoy, post-“Shameless” but pre-Hollywood, is sous chef Joe Macbeth. He and kitchen offsider Billy Banquo are annoyed that celebrity chef and restaurant owner, Duncan Docherty, takes all the credit for their work.

To add insult to injury, Duncan is planning to leave the business to his son. Enter three council binmen/witches—one includes Ralph Ineson, “Finchy” from “The Office” – with their prophesies of the future, all declared from their truck cabin in the middle of a tip.

In-jokes abound for the careful watcher: the three bin men/witches—Barry, Maurice and … Andy! – eat lunch in their truck listening to the Bee Gees’ “Night Fever.”

When Malcolm comments on something said in the kitchen with: “That’s very Gordon Ramsay,” Billy admonishes him by pointing out it’s bad luck to say that name out loud. “Just call him ‘The Scottish Chef,’” Billy quips.

Can Joe and his maître d’ wife – Lady Macbeth – enact their evil scheme and outwit head waiter Peter Macduff in the process? No spoilers, although the story is almost 400 years old!

The Scottish play finishes, but it has only whetted my appetite. My YouTube search for all things stereotypical Scottish – Scotch eggs, haggis, porridge and the like – finally ends in a St. Andrew’s flag of a Scottish celebrity-chef recipe brawl.

In the blue corner, with the collops of beef with whisky and mushroom cream, is Nick Nairn. In the white corner, is Gordon Ramsay, with his butter-roasted rib-eye with grilled artichokes. Who will win my Aberdeen-Angus-beef cook off?

To be continued …