The residents of the small Berkshire village of Bray are tonight battoning down the hatches as it was revealed that Heston Blumenthal had been attacked by his own food. The rogue dish has escaped his laboratory and run on the rampage through the village.

Blumenthal is in a critical but stable condition at the Royal Berkshire Hospital after the incident in which a new dish that he was creating with his laboratory helper, Igor, mutated. Igor told reporters outside the hospital:

“It was horrible. We were making a very simple dish of lark’s vomit and liquorice extract on a base of caviar and reindeer gut. Heston had added nitrous oxide before adding his key ingredient – radiation – and the dish just turned on him. It jumped from the plate, seized him by the throat, and I beat it off with a hippopotamus tongue. It jumped out of the window and that’s the last I saw of it.”

Residents in Bray are reportedly “very worried” about the development. One, former magician Paul Daniels, said that “around 8pm last night, when I was trying to saw Debbie in half, we heard a scratching at the door. There was some growling, so I put the saw down and went to the door. I shouted ’say Yes Paul’, which is my signature catchphrase, you see, and something seemed to say ‘Yes Paul’ back. Nobody’s done that since the 1980s, so I was very scared.”

Carol Vorderman said that she would “never go out again”, which has reportedly raised the morale of everyone within the town, while a naked Billy Connolly was seen in the bushes with a baseball bat in the early hours of the morning shouting “here dishy dishy.”

Laboratory assistant Igor, however, says that he is on a one-man quest to calm the escaped food. “As Heston lay spluttering on the floor, he told me that the only way to get the food back into the laboratory was to tempt it back in with candied kangaroo tail. We’ve only got ten left so this had better work!”