after Gordon basically moved to the US full time, they had his mentor and guy who infamously made him cry Marco Pierre White take over the UK Hell's Kitchen which led to him doing some other shows and I finally realized what the odd quirk Gordon always did on shows forever that I never understood came from because Gordon does it somewhat subtly, whereas Marco is blatant about it, they get presented a dish and Marco basically removes half the items from it and focuses on just a couple things before making his decision, Gordon will more subtly move stuff around on the plate but is targeting certain items (you can also notice this if you watch on Top Chef with Tom Colicchio who does it and some of the other chefs that guest do it) and from a layman's point of view you're like, they aren't even tasting it, i don't get it (and this was a complaint by posters in MasterChef GAF for a long time)
and they aren't really...Marco was the only one who actually explained that most of these dishes are fluff that can be taught to fix, or may have just gone wrong that one time for whatever reason, etc. all things you can fix by teaching them or correcting prep or what have you, but when judging and looking for potential on these shows you want to pick up on the two or three things that the person had the most control over and whether they grasped it, especially if he had taught them earlier how exactly to do it
also Marco's a big softee, but I can see why some people couldn't handle him, when he did a US show some of the Americans had a much harder time dealing with his personality than when he did the same show in the UK, I assume they expected more like Gordon with the screaming and such which you can just tune out, but Marco has this whole quiet "ah, you've disappointed me I see" vibe that you could tell just sent some people up a wall
