For the sake of journalistic disclosure, I have to reveal a vested interest: I am, and always have been, a Rick Stein Ultra. There is simply nothing more soothing than watching Rick Stein pootle around Europe, slowly getting hammered, meandering into quality restaurants more by luck than judgment, slipping away to the galley kitchen out back to watch a gruff chef quietly prepare a broth, and squinting in the sun outside a windswept beachfront restaurant with an enormous mountain of fruits de mer.

Every episode of every TV show Rick Stein has ever made is essentially like watching your dad have a particularly joyful Christmas Day, rubbing his hands with glee over a long-aged sherry, sitting upright to eat a large plate of continental sausages, regaling you with tales of childhoods gone by as soon as someone rolls a braised rabbit out in front of him, saying he’s too full for pudding but eating it anyway. Rick Stein is the TV equivalent of a nap in a good armchair after a Sunday roast: necessary, peaceful, luxuriously exquisite and very slightly naughty.

Rick Stein’s Secret France (Tuesday, 9pm, BBC Two) is more of the same, then. I am not going to sit here and pretend Rick Stein has been wildly innovative, creating a new travel-based TV cooking show setup, because he hasn’t: it is Rick Stein, doing Rick Stein things, this time in France. It is almost deliberate in its Steininess: Secret France bears all the hallmarks of classic Rick – unnecessary trips to port towns, the jump-shot of a clean plate after he’s served a gratin on to it, subtle digs at his own director via voiceover – all the while pinned to the same travelogue-mashed-with-eating-and-drinking-format. The only mild change is that in France, Stein seems more reluctant than ever to deviate from his gastrotour to actually get in the set kitchen and cook, so he mainly just bungs a load of lardons on a tart then calls the job a good ’un. The man cooks with the intensity of someone who knows that, somewhere, a pint with their name on it is rapidly growing warm.

Twenty years ago, Rick Stein discovered a grift that would define a millennium – that, once a year, the BBC will pay him to take a three-week trip to get drunk on expenses in any country he wants as long as he takes a three-man camera crew away for the ride – and Secret France is the natural conclusion of that. He is very simply repeating a childhood holiday he once had, but this time is allowed to drink wine and go on backstage tours of cheese factories. It is impossible to calculate how many penknives he might try to smuggle back on the ferry.

Long may this continue. You can keep your “new money” TV chefs – Nigella, with her sumptuous M&S ad soft focus; Jamie, with the energy of a primary school assembly church pastor; Mary Berry, primly and precisely knifing out a flan – because true art is Big Dick Stein, in a fleece that he broke the zip on three days ago and can’t make go back, three glasses into a bottle of Reisling, slowly saluting the sun. Forza! Forza Rick Stein!

• This article was amended on 25 November 2019 to correct a bares/bears homophone.