With the birth of his sixth child, it’s time for Gordon Ramsay to give up the tough-guy act

I’m finding it pretty hard to reconcile the man who’s most famous for screaming “it’s f****** raw!” at a crying sous chef with a man who definitely has a favourite episode of ‘Bluey’, says Ryan Coogan

I’m not a huge fan of Gordon Ramsay, but I see the appeal. He speaks his mind (or at least he does a good impression of a person who speaks their mind). He says the forbidden words, like “damn” and “bums”. He’s like Simon Cowell, but instead of crushing the dreams of people who can’t sing, he gets really, really angry about over-seasoned pasta. I get it.

He’s been around for a long time, but he’s made a name for himself in recent years as a real no-nonsense, cutthroat, man’s man sort of individual. He has a huge following online among the type of people who use words like “grindset”, and post black-and-white photos of men in cowboy hats on Instagram. He’s a paragon of masculinity for people who have a really one-dimensional idea of what it means to be masculine.

But as the host of the US reality TV show Hell’s Kitchen welcomes his sixth child into the world – a 7lbs 10oz “whopper”, according to Ramsay’s Instagram – it’s time to ask: hasn’t the tough guy act sort of run its course at this point?

I’m not saying there’s anything un-masculine about having kids – there’s something very Genghis Khan about siring a bunch of children and referring to them as a “brigade” – but I’m finding it pretty hard to reconcile the man who’s most famous for screaming “it’s f****** raw!” at a crying sous chef with a man who definitely has a favourite episode of Bluey.

Six children is a lot of children. I know that four of them are in their twenties now, but that still means Ramsay has spent at least as much of his career elbow deep in dirty nappies as he has preparing steak (sorry if you were eating a steak while reading this, for some reason, but that’s on you). He now has a four-year-old and a newborn, which means that the next time he tries to pull his faux tough guy schtick, just remember that he’s doing it between marathoning Peppa Pig and doing all the voices in The Tiger Who Came To Tea.

Ramsay joins a pantheon of men who play tough guys on TV and also have a bunch of extra kids really late in life (it’s a pretty exclusive club) that also include Robert De Niro and Al Pacino. 83-year-old Pacino welcomed his fourth child into the world in June, while De Niro had his seventh in April, at age 80.

Between them these three men, whose combined age is 220, have enough children to stage a full (wildly confusing) production of Rent, with a few left over to help work the lights. Scientists say that by 2090, one in every three people on the planet will share DNA with a famous man who swears on television.

This isn’t the only time in recent weeks that Ramsay has been in the news for something wildly incongruent with his TV persona. A few weeks ago the celebrity chef was roundly mocked after a video went viral of him speaking to Jake Humphrey on the High Performance Podcast about how he was able to afford his first home. In the clip, Ramsay details how he asked his father-in-law for a £20,000 loan to buy a flat, during a period of his life while he owned a Porsche 911. When his father-in-law pointed this out to him, Ramsay acted as though he had just been caught in a clever deception, calling the old man a “clever f****r”.

As many people pointed out, the so-called “advice” that Ramsay received from his father-in-law wasn’t so much “clever” as it was “extremely obvious, of course you should sell your expensive car instead of begging for money, Gordon”. It made Ramsay seem wildly out of touch, and like most things to come out of his mouth these days undermined the no-nonsense, common-sense version of himself that he’s been projecting out to the world for the past two decades.

Again, there’s nothing wrong with any of this, necessarily. It’s fine to be a small-c conservative family man with no idea how money works. But it may be time for Ramsay to let go of the character he’s been playing for all these years. He’s not a big scary monster who doesn’t have time for your s***. He’s a (past) middle aged, (past) middle-class dad, and based on what I know about babies, he has all the time in the world for s***. Let it go, Gordon. It’s okay to be boring.