The phone on my desk rings. It’s Pete. Haven’t spoken to him in a while and the poor man sounds frantic. Turns out he dropped an email to a BBC TV show called Instant Restaurants the previous day to register his interest in being a participant and they’ve phoned him back today to invite him to take part in a show being recorded that evening. Pete’s wife is ill and he needs a complete mug friend to take her place. I am that friend, or at least I am the first friend that was stupid enough to say yes.

So, with two and a half hours’ notice, I rush home to iron a shirt (well, in fairness, I rushed to the shop first to buy a new shirt, then rushed home to iron it), trim the mane and try and tease my barnet into something resembling presentable. A quick swig of courage, courtesy of Uncle Jack, and we’re on our way to some chap’s house nearby. Frankly, my gut is churning and I just know I’m going to end up regretting it.

The basic premise of the show is an amateur chef opening up his home as a restaurant for a bunch of complete strangers who at the end of the night will pay what they think the meal is worth. Apparently, “underground restaurants” are becoming something of a trend, and I must confess I had been tempted to give one a whirl since I saw Jamie Oliver doing something similar on his US tour. I hadn’t imagined that I might share my first experience on national telly.

“Let’s play it vanilla”, says I to Pete, “whatever we do, we don’t want to do anything that’ll end up on the trailers and be repeated for eternity on Dave”. Pete was more concerned by the fact that two blokes turning up together might look “a bit gay”. With action plan and avoidance notes thus decided, we booted over to the location and found ourselves in the middle of a housing estate, signing away all our rights on a TV contract, that rather worryingly included a clause to say that the production company was not responsible if we should in any way die during the filming of the show.

Next, we were filmed “arriving” at the house, complete with some awful banal dialogue that Pete and I made up on the spur of the moment which would have been a cringeworthy moment had it ever made the final cut. The whole time we were there I though that we were going to be completely stitched up. “Stand closer together”, said the rather lovely Australian camera lady, “trust me – it doesn’t look as close on camera”. I practically had my tongue in Pete’s ear.

We were greeted (after I had been filmed pressing the doorbell about 20 times) by our “waitress” for the evening, who was thoroughly delightful and had somehow been arm-twisted by some friend of a friend of the chef to do the job. I thought she was very professional actually, and the most authentic restaurant experience of the evening. The rest was not so great.

The “chef” had cleared his front room and set out a couple of tables, complete with plastic chairs of the kind my arse last graced during my English Lit exam. The room was rather sterile and the rack of lighting equipment and cameras hardly added to the atmosphere. Anyway, the waitress duly served us some of the wine that we had brought with us and we sat whispering to each other waiting for our fellow guests to arrive. These comprised three middle-aged ladies, who joined our table, and three local lads with proper thick Somerset accents.

To start we had a choice of scallops or a mushroom salad. Seafood is rarely my first choice when dining out, so mushrooms it was. Nicely cooked they were too, however the salad comprised mainly of raw onions swimming in vinegar was not to my taste. Some considerable time later, we were given the choice for the main course of either more seafood or lamb. After seafood, the meat I am least likely to order is lamb, but faced with this choice, I had to go with it. As it turned out, I really enjoyed it. The veg was well cooked (if a little cold on the plate) and some of the lamb was delicious. Some of it was raw. I did my best, but when your dinner is eyeing you dolefully from the plate and bleating gently as you spear it with your fork, it doesn’t do much for appetite.

It was at this point that I picked up some of the floppy raw meat and made some rather predictable gag about a talented vet being able to bring the thing back to the land of the living. A camera was duly stuck in my face and I was made to repeat my gag, which was nowhere near as amusing the second time around. Thankfully, this toe-curling moment missed the edit, as they focused instead on the hair one of my fellow diners found in her desert.

I chose apple sponge with custard (or as Masterchef insist on calling it, ‘creme Anglais’ – yo Wallace, we’re in England not France and it is called custard) for desert. This was OK, although it certainly wasn’t a sponge. Lovely stodgy cake, yes – sponge, no.

By this time, fully 3 hours had passed since we first came in. Now, I’m in favour of lingering over a good meal with pleasant company, but this was a bit long even by my standards. Finally, it was time for an on-camera interview… in the garden… in November… at night. I was cold. I managed by some sheer fluke not to sound like a complete tool, and then parted with more money than I really wanted to for the meal, because I’m a snob and didn’t want to seem like a skinflint on national telly.

All in all, an interesting experience, that thankfully very few people that I knew ever watched.

I think next we should try to get on Bargain Hunt. I reckon I would really suck at that.