Gordon Ramsay

Before the shouting there were the restaurants, and they were real. Gordon Ramsay founded his restaurant group in 1997; it has been awarded 17 Michelin stars over its lifetime, and his signature room in Chelsea has held three of them since 2001. Those numbers are what give the television persona its licence, and they are the reason the act reads as authority rather than as tantrum for hire.

Television found him in 1999 with the documentary series Boiling Point, which caught him mid-service and mid-temper and established the template everything since has repeated. What he is genuinely good at, and it is a real skill, is making the mechanics of a professional kitchen legible to people who have never worked in one: the timing, the waste, the chain of small failures that becomes a ruined service. The abuse is the packaging around that.

The empire divides cleanly. The competition shows, Hell's Kitchen and the MasterChef family, run on manufactured pressure. The rescue shows, Kitchen Nightmares and Gordon Behind Bars, run on his other mode, the one where he stops shouting, sits down and does the actual work of teaching. Then there is the travel strand, Gordon Ramsay: Uncharted and the road trips with Gino D'Acampo and Fred Sirieix, which are essentially holiday programmes with a knife roll. He voices animation now too, which tells you how thoroughly the persona has become a brand in its own right.