the great british blog off
To the list of things we all consider ourselves to be supremely talented at: driving, s*x and interviewing, I need to proffer another, cooking. I have wrongly considered myself to be a bit hot in the kitchen but it’s time to eat these words. Despite my weighty and ever-growing collection of largely unread cookbooks, left to my own my culinary devices it’s become obvious that my go-to lockdown staples consist of the same four dishes, three of them featuring pasta with some form of slippery sauce. Thankfully, with the return of MasterChef, I can metaphorically don a big white hat at a jaunty angle and vicariously enjoy the obvious delights of waiting for the flawless soufflé to rise, perfectly prepping Jerusalem artichokes and bringing a Béarnaise sauce up to temperature without burning it.
TV chefs have always done it for me. Back in the 70s Graham Kerr as The Galloping Gourmet proved a surprisingly watchable kitchen-hero in a northern house that ‘enjoyed’ spam every Thursday and chips with even the Sunday roast. The fact that, at the end of each show Kerr would ‘gallop’ into the audience and escort the most stunningly beautiful woman to his table showed me the way to a woman’s heart was the same as to a man’s! The larger-than-life restaurateur and bon viveur, Keith Floyd, was next-up to the hot-plate and his wild, eccentric style of presentation – always with a large glass of wine in hand – endeared him to millions of viewers worldwide. Sadly, his lifestyle also endeared him to a large number of hospital staff and the inevitable heart-attack called-time at the premature age of only sixty-five.
Contrary to the early pioneers, you’d be forgiven for thinking many of today’s TV chefs wouldn’t pass muster in the cut and thrust of hell’s kitchen. For all her pouts and tingly ASMR delivery, Nigella, would not see out a single service without crashing back on the coke and whispering Nigel Slater’s delicate forage for edible flowers would surely be cut short by a foul-mouthed Gordon Ramsey before a store detective could utter ‘Anthony Worrall Thompson’s poaching pocket!’. Others seem more determined to clock-up the air-miles than explore the more creative of culinary challenges: someone needs to point out to Rick Stein than a fish stew is still a fish stew irrespective of what continent he cooks it on.
However, being branded a TV chef doesn’t automatically mean they can cook. Step forward Ready Steady Cook’s Ainsley Harriott, a man you cannot visualise being anywhere near a hot-stove without a baying audience of middle-aged menopausal mums hysterically swooning over his comically large innuendo-laden pepper grinder. Ainsley speaks to us of a less-intense, less-pressured time for TV chefs and I’ll leave you with the famous words of the original broadcasting protagonist Fanny Cradock’s slightly bumbling hen-pecked husband, Johnnie, who at the end of one of their shows focussing on desserts and puddings exclaimed “May all your doughnuts turn out like Fanny’s”. Indeed.
