Some ideas are both good and bad.

As Gary mentioned once before, cleaning a George Foreman grill can be a tad tricky. There is a special knack to it, which I have, but I always strive to improve where I can, so I decided to experiment a bit the other night, with mixed results.

The knack to cleaning a George Foreman grill without going mad is to clean it while it's hot. Covering it in soaking kitchen towel while it's switched on works pretty well. But then that Harriott bloke started advertising Fairy Power Spray as being the answer to all your cooked-on-food problems, and, well, it was worth a try. In retrospect, I made a couple of mistakes, not including listening to the dish-washing advice of a man who has people to do that sort of thing for him.

Fairy Power Spray, it is my duty to report, does work pretty damn well. I'm not sure it's all that much better than plain old undiluted Fairy, to be honest, but it has the gimmick of a spray-gun, and I like a good gimmick. However, if I could make one criticism of it, it's that the spray action is over too tight an angle. This means that, to cover your dirty pan or grill, you have to use rather a lot of it. This can cause problems.

Anyway, so I dowsed Mr Foreman's grill with Power Spray, switched it on, waited a couple of minutes, and started scrubbing with a wet sponge. Not bad results, from a cleaning point of view, though no improvement over my old method. Like I said, there were a couple of things I would recommend doing differently.

My first mistake was simple overkill. Too much of the power spray, yes, but also there was no need to switch the grill on. I was striving for more sheer cleaning power than man was meant to mess with, frankly: water plus heat is good, water plus detergent is good, but water plus detergent plus heat is just too much, damn it.

Those of you of a scientific (or simply non-stupid) bent may have divined my second mistake upon reading the words "detergent plus heat". My second mistake was, of course, breathing in the same building as large quantities of roasting Fairy Power Spray.