Gordon Ramsay became famous as television’s shoutiest kitchen anti-hero. Ironically, his new show, Next Level Chef, will have left a lot of people speechless.

The cooking competition featured a dozen culinary enthusiasts of varying levels of ability, each jockeying for the praise of Ramsay and fellow judges and chefs Nyesha Arrington and Paul Ainsworth, with a £100,000 prize as a sweetener.

The twist was that they were cooking up a storm in a bizarre three-storey kitchen, which looked like a cross between a Bond villain’s lair and a medieval torture chamber.

It was divided into three levels: a state-of-the-art top floor, a serviceable middle and a bottom rung that looked like a rancid bedsit with cooking facilities to match. Teams were each allocated a level and then invited to grab food from a huge platter and start cooking (those at the top getting first dibs on the ingredients). It was chaos, lacking the amateur charm of Bake Off and the serious foodie pedigree of MasterChef.

The concept was daft with a side-serving of baffling. Daft can of course work on television – just look at Taskmaster’s success – but the problem with Next Level Chef was that there were far too many moving parts. Take, for example, the motorised kitchen. This lurched up and down like a monstrous dumbwaiter, allowing contestants to step on and off as demanded by the bizarre rules.

Ramsay, whose own production company makes the series, has brought Next Level Chef to the UK after successfully debuting the show in America. Quelle horreur, the format is also bound for France.

Loud and demonstrative, Ramsay and his fellow judges seemed to think they were still on US television (Arrington won season one of Next Level Chef in America). But their banter jarred with the softly spoken contestants. Former Army cook Selwyn and Paralympian Callum looked like they wouldn’t say boo to a goose – even if they were plucking it and about to chuck it into a pan.

The competition had an arcane set of rules. If a chef on your “level” was judged to have cooked the dish of the week, you were safe from elimination and your team had bagsies on the fancy kitchen in the next episode.

But if you weren’t on the successful team, you risked being one of two called to participate in a cook-off. Lose that and you were going home. Win and your side secured the middle kitchen next week. All clear?

Oh, and though Ramsay was a judge on the earlier segment, for the cook-off the final decision rested with Ainsworth and Arrington. Ramsay confined himself to watching from the sidelines, shouting things such as “If it’s undercooked you’re screwed! If it’s overcooked you’ve nowhere to go!”

This was the point at which my brain went off the boil. I hadn’t been as confused since trying to explain Dungeons and Dragons to my nine-year-old.

Ramsay enjoyed himself, even if everybody else radiated varying levels of bemusement. “There’s only one temperature… and that’s perfection!” he said at the start, sounding like a parody of himself from a Knives Out-style farce. “Three, two, one… grab, grab, grab!” he instructed his charges when the food arrived.

In the end, former chef Kelly triumphed in the fry-off against home cook Tia. But rather than happy or sad, both seemed bewildered. Viewers may have felt likewise at the end of an hour of food-based telly that was completely out to lunch.

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