Gregg Wallace in MASTERCHEF

MasterChef returned to BBC1 on Tuesday 17th January 2012 with an average audience of 4.75 million viewers, a 19.7 per cent share of all those watching television between 9pm and 10pm.

With over 150 million viewers world-wide, MasterChef is a totally unique cooking competition rife with culinary and human drama, testing budding amateur chefs to the limit with a series of tough challenges judged by experts.

This is the eighth nail-biting series of the show, with expert judges John Torode and Gregg Wallace putting the new round of contestants through their paces.