In the kitchen, an espresso machine hums, a toaster pops and contestants dig in the fridge, rattle cutlery, but the action that matters is at the long dining table. A boom microphone hangs over Sun Etheridge, Craig Young and Peter Vickery — the only contestants cooking today — as they natter about the day ahead. Sun's having toast and eggs; the blokes flick through newspapers. “Let's go to the movies,” Craig suggests, pausing at the entertainment pages. To understand the absurdity of his proposal, know this: the 20 remaining MasterChef contestants who share the house are effectively prisoners of one of our most successful television series ever (last July, more than a quarter of the Australian population tuned into the final of the second series of this phenomenon). For as long as these contestants survive in the show — and if they're as good as 2009's winner, Julie Goodwin, or last year's Adam Liaw, that could be up to eight months — the course of their demanding days is determined for them. It's all set out on a whiteboard next to a meticulously maintained pantry (duck stock, anyone?) that's frequently raided by the shadowy members of what some in the house have dubbed the “midnight cooking group”. Today's schedule: “Wake-up: 0530-0545; shoot: 0615; depart: 0745 (Sun/Craig/Peter), 0800 (everyone else). Sun/Craig/Peter: chef whites, black pants; everyone else: new day civvies.” There's also a roster of house duties dictating who cooks dinner, who sweeps and mops, who takes out the compost and tends the worm farm, who waters the herbs. Think that's all a pain in the neck? The contestants have relinquished their mobile phones and have no internet or email access while they're in the competition. When they return from the set to the house each night, they're not allowed out. There's a gym in the garage and a small lap pool for the fitness inclined. A hammock offers the greatest reprieve for those seeking solitude. No visits to restaurants or the movies. Jobs or studies are put on hold: contestants get $500 a week to keep on top of mortgages and bills. Once a week only are they permitted to call loved ones. In a rare concession to family ties, 36-year-old Orange resident Kate Bracks, one of two mothers of young children competing, gets to meet her husband and children — aged eight, six and three — in a park once a fortnight. “I have an incredibly supportive, capable husband,” says Kate. Series producer Caroline Spencer, the trash-television-loving dynamo who masterminds the show and who admits to a fondness for Dexter and Girls of the Playboy Mansion, knows it's a tough drill. “You put a group of people who are used to having control of their own lives under pressure, doing things that they haven't done before … it's very confronting and it's not for everyone.”

Emotions, tears, crises, pimples, fault lines and flaws are all exposed to those cameras, to a nation's scrutiny, sometimes ridicule: just think of contestant Joanne Zalm last year, who was rewarded for her hard work with a “Get rid of Joanne” Facebook page. Who'd want to do it? About 7000 Australians, judging by the number of applications this year. Sun, Peter and Craig, who in a few hours will compete against a top Australian chef in an Immunity Challenge, gravitated towards each other early in the production and clearly have spent time analysing their fellow contestants' personalities. “Everybody on the show is an extrovert; like you wouldn't be here really if you weren't,” says Sun, a 32-year-old Queenslander who was raised a Hare Krishna and, until recently, was a vegetarian. (In the first week of the contest, she disjointed a raw chicken without flinching.) “If you were introverted, you would just crash and burn,” adds Craig, 43, a cellist with the Queensland Symphony Orchestra. But even extroverts need their space. The last time Craig shared a room with anyone was at grade 10 school camp. He was unimpressed when he discovered he was sharing a bedroom in the house with seven others — and that it had the house's only Foxtel connection. “Certain things get on my nerves,” he says. One night, for example, a gang gathered to watch the cricket in the room at 10 o'clock when he wanted to sleep. “I was getting a little annoyed. I'm not a sports fan.” At the breakfast table, boom mike hovering, camera running, the story producer is encouraging the trio to talk about their expectations for the day ahead. All they know is that, because they won an Invention Test the previous day with their “money bags” of pork meatballs and pork belly, they each have a chance to earn a prized Immunity Pin — a get-out-of-jail-free card that can be used to evade a future crisis. But they're relaxed. After all, the worst that can happen is that they lose the challenge and don't get a pin. Today, at least, no one gets kicked off the show. Hayden Quinn, a tousled 24-year-old northern beaches lifeguard who wears a chain with a silver cleaver pendant, wanders into view carrying a bowl of cereal. He bagged an Immunity Pin in an earlier challenge by cooking a superior agnolotti to Ormeggio apprentice chef Alex Keene. Hayden shows the pin to Peter, who takes it and holds it up against his own chest. “It works for me,” jokes the 50-year-old Surry Hills sales manager who dreams of a future growing heirloom fruit and vegetables.

It's 8.15am and Matt Preston has just pressed his own juice at a buffet table jammed between the catering and wardrobe vans. Preston's bouncy fellow judge George Calombaris is having bircher muesli. “I always go for low GI,” says the 32-year-old Melburnian, proud owner of six restaurants and an olive oil brand who has also penned three cookbooks. Through the wardrobe van's partly open door comes a flash of white — judge Gary Mehigan's belly as he changes into a suit. Matt, Gary and George – household names now, commodities, setting the pace for any ambitious celeb chef or food identity. In hair and make-up — a shipping container without running water — Preston submits to blow-dryer and hairspray and refuses to discuss his contract or rumours about even bigger things in his future. Instead, the London-born food critic and writer who gives pet names to his cravats (“Lilac Leona”, “Wild Wilma”, “The Cricketer”) talks about green rooms. He once interviewed an EastEnders star with a fountain in hers. “During the first series of MasterChef, when the green room was in a shipping container, there was a downpour and it leaked. 'I've achieved my water feature,' I told everyone.” The judges now have a proper trailer, its door flanked by pot plants, with three couches for naps, a working television and a Wii. Judges and contestants have yet to cross paths today: Sun, Peter and Craig are getting miked up in the contestants' “holding pen”. The other 17 are gossiping or lounging with cookbooks on the set's mezzanine level, from where they'll later shout encouragement to the three in the challenge. “It's like when you're sitting on the side of the footy or I'm sitting at work watching the guys surfing, you want to be there doing it,” says Hayden, who claims Jamie Oliver and Anthony Bourdain as his culinary heroes. Hayden's desire to be doing something is entirely understandable: oh, the tedium of filming. Sun, Peter and Craig first stride through the doors of the set at around 9.15am with a whirring, swooping pterodactyl of a camera tracking their path but it's not until just before midday that they start cooking – after more than two hours of shooting and reshooting the intro, as entrances, exits and lines are endlessly repeated. “Exciting, isn't it?” says one cameraman. “We always joke about the 'glamour' of television.” “Here we go, nice and quiet thanks upstairs,” says first assistant director Michael Venables. “Welcome back to the MasterChef kitchen,” says Gary. And again with a different emphasis. “Welcome back to the MasterChef kitchen.” From the audience above comes yawning, fidgeting, scratching.

Gary: “We've seen two very eclectic challenges in the kitchen so far and today will be no different.” Again: “We've seen two very electric challenges in the kitchen …” The judges' lines are scripted but their spontaneity and ad-libbing add another tonal layer. From an upstairs control room, Caroline Spencer and her colleagues maintain a close relationship with the judges' ears. Each has an earpiece through which they receive instructions. “It'll be to point out things that have happened they may not have seen – a contestant looks terrified — 'Quick, ask them a question,' ” says Spencer. “Or they'll say something and we'll go, 'We can say that in far less words. Can you say it again for me like this?' ” The preferred grabs are later stitched together in the editing suite for, hopefully, a seamless result. The control room is not the only source of interruptions. The flight path plays havoc with filming. “You are competing against one chef,” Gary tells Sun, Peter and Craig as the cameras roll, “but there's a large aeroplane going over so I'm not going to tell you who it is …” On set, sources of mirth are plentiful. Give the judges half a chance and they'll be in a huddle, clowning, high-fiving, cracking themselves up. “When it gets really boring, we'll do polar bear impressions,” says Preston, big haired, his fleshy features almost comical in make-up. The camaraderie between the three could not be anything but sincere but Preston acknowledges the truth of stories about splinters between judges in the first season. “There was tension,” he says, adding that it was not related to him. “I think the show [took] some time to find its feet.” By the time Gary announces that the three contestants will face Melbourne chef Adam D'Sylva in today's Immunity Challenge, Craig's feet are killing him. But he can't spare a thought for them. All focus must be on the three D'Sylva dishes he, Sun and Peter now need to cook in 65 minutes: crisp, sweet pork with pomelo, mint and fried wai wai noodle salad, black pepper ocean trout with green mango and spanner crab salad, and scallops with pearl tapioca and Yarra Valley salmon caviar. MasterChef's cooking challenges are as real, as white-knuckled, as the series gets; for the contestants and competing professional chefs, there are no retakes for stumbles or spills or stuff-ups. “I'm loving this — three against one,” says Gary, as the clock starts to tick, the 17 idle contestants above roar and the digital clapperboard declares shooting has started. D'Sylva, the highly regarded chef behind Coda in Melbourne's CBD, is on one side of a partition working solo — no assistance, no written recipes. Behind him, Sun, Peter and Craig appear to have the advantage, three to his one and with printed recipes in front of them. But when D'Sylva dismembers his whole ocean trout with seemingly one fluid, swashbuckling knife movement, it's clear where the balance of power lies. On the other side of the partition, while Sun fries off a spice paste with furrowed brow and Craig separates scallops from their shells, Peter is struggling with his fish. He has filleted it clumsily with trembling hands and, as series food producer Glenn Flood points out off-camera, has left way too much flesh on the bone. Flood should know. Every dish that is cooked for the cameras has been prepared up to three times off-camera in his test kitchen. He has identified every possible pressure point that might trip up contestants and timed each dish to within an inch of its life. “It's really important that we're giving the contestant something that's achievable; that we're not putting them in a position to fail.”

The word “failure” is not one that MasterChef's relentlessly positive, pep-talking judges would be likely to use but the fact remains, there will be at least one loser at the end of today. “Three minutes of silent, nervous waiting, please,” a story producer tells D'Sylva and the three contestants, who are now being filmed waiting for the judges' decisions in a room to the side of the main set. Sun turns to Craig, raises her eyebrows, squeezes out a smile. Peter paces, arms folded. “That's some of your best work, Pete,” Craig jokes when the cameras switch off. The contestants know what many MasterChef fans might have suspected: their dishes will likely be cold when the judges taste them. “I don't think it's an unfair situation because they will come and look at it and taste it as you're going,” says Sun. Caroline Spencer confirms that the judges are directed to taste elements of dishes as soon as they are cooked — straight from the pot — that would suffer if they were cold and defends the process with another argument: “The reason we use real chefs and real experts is because their palate is developed enough that they can judge it.” And there's no quibbling over the judges' verdicts — at least not today. When D'Sylva and the three contestants again come face to face with the judges on the main set late in the afternoon, there's a quick admission from Peter: “You can see the level of detail and finesse is lacking in what we do.” George, rocking on his heels, is quick to return fire with praise: “I'm so proud of you three: when I heard Adam D'Sylva was in the building, I was worried for the three of you.” But the amateurs are happy, even when their score of 21 out of 30 is eclipsed by D'Sylva's 27. Sun blushes fiercely when she gets high Preston praise for her pork. Today, there'll be no tears. Loading The surprise is that there aren't more tears, more often, in greater floods. The MasterChef camera doesn't lie: in fact, it understates the extreme physical and emotional demands on contestants. “A Stockholm-syndrome kind of situation” is the way Sun describes it. “Like being bipolar,” says Craig. “You have these extreme highs when you're so excited; you're doing a team challenge and the adrenalin is pumping and you're just so excited and then you get these ridiculous lows if you lose.” There have been times that Peter has wanted to throw up. “I've had moments. Look, sometimes things just don't go well … And it's hard to pick yourself up again.” But then the next day, he says, might be good. “It really is this ride.”

“The weird thing about it is the pressure and the fear and the terror is huge fun,” Sun says. “I've never been an adrenalin junkie and now I am just mad for the feeling that you get after.”