John Walsh: How I learnt to love Jamie

He had become a parody of himself - a cheeky chappie with a trendy scooter and 'really' annoying patter. But then 15 no-hopers gave Jamie Oliver the chance to make gripping TV and a brilliant restaurant

As turnarounds go, this is in the major-league. We're talking Saul becoming St Paul on the Road to Damascus. We're looking at John Travolta moving from Look Who's Talking 3 to star in Pulp Fiction. We're thinking in believe-it-or-not headlines: "Myra Hindley Revealed As Caring Earth-Mother"; "Nicky Haslam Joins Monastery", "Saddam Hussein Wins 'World's Most Co-operative Politician' Award". As mind-boggling transformations go, this is right up there with Dr Jekyll – only this is a case of Mr Hyde becoming the good guy. This is a story of how Jamie Oliver turned into a human being.

It may be hard for long-term fans of Master Oliver to fathom the profundity of the nation's loathing for their mockney pin-up. It's hard to put one's finger on the exact cause of the trouble, that solitary detail that one person finds so –illogically – enraging about another. Perhaps it was his hair, that perpendicular Tintin quiff; or maybe his parp-parping little Vespa motor scooter; or his slightly goitrous pale blue eyes; or the fact that he seemed to talk in a kind of chronic, incredulous splutter; or the way he always seemed to be running everywhere, throwing things around the kitchen, bunging things in, walloping things out, bish-bosh, zing-zing, as though he could never relax because he was so, you know, urgent about everything. Or perhaps it was the stories about how he cut his culinary teeth by "helping out" his dad, bless 'im, in the family boozer, or maybe it was his gran, to whom he is so joshingly, so incorrigibly, so Jamily familiar (and do you know, the old girl probably loves it!). Or perhaps it was that slight bagginess about his jeans, as if he couldn't be arsed to find a pair that fitted him, even when he'd made a colossal wedge out of The Naked Chef, (the jammy, or Jamie, bastard). At times I've wondered if it was something to do with his posse of buddies, that noisome, supine, good-for-nothing crew of inner-city layabouts who may well have been real-life personal friends of Mr Oliver but seemed, in the telly ads, about as convincing as the cray-zee group of mates that habitually surround the hero or heroine in any movie written by Richard Curtis. Or possibly it was the way, in one of the TV commercials, he rubbed his tummy and laughed because he'd just had a lovely feed of freebie giveaways from Sainsbury's deli counter, like a character from the pages of the Beano. Of course, some people claimed that what they really couldn't stand about the boy was the language he used, not just the word "pukka" – although of course that was enough to give you nosebleeds – but the way he hi-jacked the language of Pearly King cockney-droll, music-hall land, and applied it to food ("and none of that low-fat malarkey!")...

Yes. That was it. It was the language he used. That's what I couldn't, personally, abide. I actually stopped buying herbs in Sainsbury's, when the Bow Bells auditor signed a deal with the supermarket chain to plug its products (especially its line of low-fat-malarkey TV dinners). I just couldn't buy the little envelopes of chives or coriander or dill, while they featured the gurning dial of Jamie O on the back, declaring, in a voice you could (unfortunately) hear in your head, "I'm absolutely doolally about herbs" and encouraging all us nervous, first-time amateurs to try them out in our hitherto unseasoned cooking, and to (this was the bit that drove me nuts) "get stuck in and give them a bash". I'm surprised they didn't give us a picture of Jamie with his thumbs aloft, and a speech bubble saying "Go on, moy son".

It was insupportable torture and it seemed to go on for years. No, hang on, it did go on for years.

So when I heard of his new venture – to choose 15 unemployed kids on the dole, aged 16 to 24, and train them up to become chefs and work in a new restaurant, whose profits would all go to charity, I was more than sceptical. It sounded a terrible idea, a motorway pile-up of Masterchef, Fame Academy and the old tearaways-in-class sitcom Please Sir! The fact that Oliver was on what amounted to a mission of mercy, rescuing dead-end kids and giving them a fresh start in life, seemed too glutinous to be true – the ostentatious display of saintliness that you associate with Michael Jackson, in his Messiah whites, saving children. On hearing that Oliver's restaurant was to run on non-profit-making lines (all profits will go to something called the Cheeky Chops Charity) a friend tapped his nose and said, "Tax dodge, old boy. Old trick."

There was, I supposed, an outside chance that my feelings for Oliver the Twister might change, and that I might find the little blighter growing on me – but if I did, I resolved darkly, I would scrape him off, like mould off the marmalade.

Jamie's Kitchen announced its intentions from the start, filming our hero in his own domestic kitchen, burning his breakfast Marmite'n'cheese toastie and flinging it away with the words "Fuckin' bollocks". The chirpy chap with the cheeky chops, freed from his BBC persona, was revealed on Channel 4 as an often sulky and despairing tyrant with the language of a Grimsby trawlerman. But as the series progressed, and the initial multitude of a thousand wannabes was winnowed down to 30, then 15 (in the familiar style of Pop Idol), a different Jamie emerged. The spoilt superchef visibly mutated into a more serious and thoughtful man in a series of existential leaps. We watched him try on the identities of teacher, employer, restaurateur, father (to Poppy, who was born during the first episode – "What do you mean by contractions?" he asked his wife Jules down the phone. "Try to hold it back at least three days, will you?"), counsellor, truant-chasing headmaster and indignant capitalist, as the budget for his enterprise doubled, and someone forget to tell him that the restaurant didn't actually own the roof above it.

Emotion, and displays of non-emotion, brought out the best in him. He put his arms around a weeping girl who failed to make the initial grade, and soothed her with promises: "Don't worry darlin', we'll look after you, we'll get you on the course you wanna do, come and see us next year, OK?". What he wanted to see was simple enthusiasm for food, passionate commitment – in other words, to see a few more people just like himself. "From now on," he told the ones who'd made it, "start thinking about food all the time. Live it and breathe it and read about it..." It was inspirational stuff. Even his cockney patois, in which everyone becomes "mate" and "my son", seemed less grating than before. And to see his shocked face when some of the lucky 15 simply didn't bother to show up for class, was to see someone genuinely appalled by the fecklessness of the human spirit. "How could they do this to me?" was written all over his face. But so was the more baffling question – baffling to him, anyway – of "Why aren't they as passionate about cookery as I am?"

His head-to-head battles with three star-struck but attitudinous girls, Michelle, Nichola and Kerry-Anne, became the stuff of soap opera, as he struggled to force the concept of professionalism into their flighty heads. His biggest failure, though, was a skinny curiosity called Michael Pizzey, a boy whose ecstatic discovery that he was a natural cook couldn't outweigh his propensity to petulant violence. Oliver supported Pizzey from the start (even when the kid failed to swallow, let alone identify or appreciate, a battered oyster), hauled him back to the kitchens when he went Awol, and showed an eloquently baffled regret when the troubled trainee was suspended after he attacked the head of a training school with a pencil and slunk off to resume his tenancy in Loser's Lane.

By the time the third episode was screened, two nights ago, the nation had decided that Oliver's awkward army of grudging superchefs was the most gripping spectacle on the box. It pulled in a startling 5.4 million viewers and a 24 per cent audience share, against the competition of Linda Green, Wild West and Alan Davis arguing that John Lennon was the greatest of the Great Britons.

And, though it sticks in my throat like a battered oyster to say so, I have to admit, after all these years of dislike, that Mr Oliver finally got to me. He has, over a matter of months – or rather three weeks of carefully-edited programming – transformed from a bumptious tosser into a natural leader of men. You can suddenly see why he was the golden boy at the River Café. You can see how he must have been the most popular boy in the playground. I could almost forgive him those terrible TV ads. And his asides to camera are priceless: he leans over one of the trainees' salted cod and asks, "You've checked the seasoning, 'ave yer?" Yes, I have, says the youth and bustles away. Oliver watches him go, waits a second, then eyeballs the camera. "My arse," he says with an indulgent smile.

At the end of the next episode (bafflingly bumped from next week's schedule by Celebrity Big Brother), after a gruelling try-out dinner session during which the restaurant kitchen becomes a Walpurgisnacht of bad tempers, bloodied fingers, boiling spills and hot tears, and the helpings of roasted skate are still not ready after 45 minutes for an unseen but mutinous audience waiting in the dining-room, Oliver makes a speech to camera that's partly a wail of loathing for the dimness of his charges and partly a Shakespearean soliloquy. "I'm really glad they felt in the shit tonight," he says. "Because cooking in the real world, when the shit hits the fan – it's horrible. I can't think of anything worse. It scares me. I'm glad it scared them. They might not like me, but I wasn't even being a bastard tonight. Wait until we've got real customers and there's AA Gill and Fay Maschler out there and we give 'em a bit of dried up old pasta like this... I've got a £1.3m restaurant being built for these guys to be cooking in. And they're crap." Amazingly, after all the years of what seems like charmed and easy success, the Naked Chef is revealed in sudden, sincere nakedness at last. And he sounds positively heroic, a twentysomething King Lear appalled by the ingratitude of those who should owe him so much.

I went along to his restaurant this week wanting to believe the transformative powers Oliver had worked on himself could make this impossible project a success. But if it was going to fail, it would surely be a picturesque failure. The signs were inauspicious. You could telephone the Fifteen restaurant all day and get nowhere – the number's always engaged, except when it just rings and rings, unanswered. A restaurant critic friend reported a series of disasters at Fifteen, especially the non-appearance of any wine until the pudding course, and the runny-raw lobster. The restaurant itself lies at the end of a cobbled sidestreet off London's City Road. The ground floor is off-puttingly blokeish, with too much smokey bar-room activity to let you enjoy your snacks-and-sarnies repast consumed off tables that are both too large and too low for comfort. Downstairs, the restaurant proper is a long, windowless room leading to what looks like a brace of air-raid shelters. The décor is a mishmash of camp and functional: cream walls, deep-pink leather sofas, bendy, white-plastic chairs, and two pillars that resemble domestic soil-pipes. The staff, though, are friendly and attentive, and there's a perverse satisfaction in gawping through the partition into the kitchen, to identify which of the tyro chef-ettes made it to the final line-up. Amazingly, Michelle, the argumentative single-parent, is there, and the bone-idle Kerry-Anne, and the bandanna-wearing Ben who, in episode four, shows up for work eight hours late.

The meal itself, however, was the thing. Would it arrive an hour late, undercooked and garnished with string? My squid with celery leaves and grilled chilli sauce was sheer perfection, while the accompanying borlotti beans were slightly over-done to make them mushy at the edges and therefore just right. The dish we saw Oliver preparing on Wednesday's programme – fillet of beef poached in Merlot and served with smashed celeriac and forest mushrooms – seemed like madness at the time (how do you poach a steak?) but melted in the mouth, while the red-wine marinade combined with the celery and mushrooms to produce a heavenly gunk.

My guest had scallops (which arrived festooned with coconut, Japanese lime, ginger, pomegranate and herb shoots in an explosion of colour), langoustine and a vanilla pannacotta surrounded by wine-reduced cherries and redcurrants. It was fantastic. At the end, we sat trying to remember when we'd ever had three such triumphant courses. The wine is ruinously expensive (£10 a glass for pretty ordinary Burgundy) and lunch for two wasn't cheap at £99.45, but it was worth it, no question.

I've no idea what went on behind the scenes to make the restaurant open on time (though the presence in the kitchen of Oliver's right-hand man Toby Puttock explains a lot), but the transformation seems complete. Of the 15 awkward know-nothings who started the course, 12 completed it without bottling out, getting fired or changing their minds, and are now running one of the best restaurants in the country. And their extraordinary transformation is entirely due to a man who transformed himself in the process from a national semi-pariah to a plausible hero and a recognisable human being. Goodbye, Jamie Bastard.