David read the first chapter of his memoirs to us in the film crew van while we were waiting for a tiny rusty ferry to take us from Haiphong to Cat Ba Island, one of the 367 islands of the Cat Ba Archipelago in Ha Long Bay, Vietnam. It took about five boats to get us there, a voyage of a mile or so to one island then a short drive to an even smaller boat on the other side of the island. We had plenty of time to listen. There was nothing else to do, certainly nothing to buy, only purple, green, or orange soft drinks on sale in dusty bottles at the kiosks on the slipways. We were all laughing so much after the first couple of pages anyway. He really wasn’t being self-effacing. His early days in TV were chaotic and his first cookery series with Keith Floyd happened only because he loved food, liked going to Floyd’s restaurant in Bristol, put him on a local arts meets rock TV programme called RPM, and thought it would be fun to make a cookery series using the Stranglers’ ‘Peaches’ as the soundtrack.
Why ‘Peaches’, I don’t know, but it worked. There had been nothing like Floyd on Fish before, it was as if rock ‘n’ roll had met cookery. The truth is that David has remained the same ever since; he does what seems fun to him at the time and pursues it single-mindedly. Sometimes this can be a little disconcerting. He thinks it’s funny that I am the clumsiest person on the planet and will go to enormous ends to film incidents of me tripping, banging, burning myself with hot fat, or cutting myself. Once when I sliced myself rather badly on a Japanese mandolin while making Taste of the Sea, he accused the cameraman, Julian Clinkard, of having no journalistic sense. Julian had stopped his camera as I was jumping up and down bleeding and swearing. David fumed that he could see it all coming and was just waiting to catch it on film. He calls me the ‘talent’ and says he’s a ‘mere technician’, but I often feel that I’m just the material. However, a few years after the mandolin incident I was leaning over the stern of a massive trawler off the Scottish coast, doodling away on my long defunct Psion organizer, when suddenly he grabbed me and pulled me back over the deck as a ton net weight swung right through where my head had been seconds before. Maybe he does care after all.
The truth about David is that because he knows what he wants and has an uncanny ability to gauge what our audience wants too, working with him, though massively annoying at times, when he’s overpoweringly in charge, is exhilarating because I always think we’re onto something new. There is something reassuring about just letting things evolve when we are filming. Sure we have a schedule, but he takes delight in changing it all at the last minute because something, maybe a stall selling dried fish by the road we’ve just passed, has excited him. In a world where TV seems to have become more and more formulaic it’s nice to have someone around with an eye for passing life. I’m not his best friend, Bernard is, but I’m very glad I’m his second best one.
Rick Stein
April 2009
Once in a blue moon, when the tide and weather was right, I’d head out to sea. If you’re thinking I’m a salty old sea dog—I’m not. The sea has to be flat, oily calm and the sun should have warmed it sufficiently so that it gives off an effervescence that tingles the nose with a whiff of old seaweed. It’s the smell that transports me back to childhood and makes me want to take off my shirt and go paddling about in rock pools. I felt a bit guilty at first, but after a few times sneaking away from the office, those pinpricks of guilt changed to surges of pure joy.
I had a little boat, and a job in production and management at the BBC in Plymouth that I didn’t care for very much. The production side, yes; management, no. So I’d clear off every so often, until the land was a misty haze behind me. Just in case there’s a BBC employment lawyer reading this, I’d like to point out that I hadn’t been properly introduced to the art, if that’s what it is, of management. To me ‘management’ was saying ‘hello and good morning’ quite loudly to people I’d meet on the way to the office first thing. And it was a long time ago.
Someone had told me that the most important thing you can possibly do as a manager is to listen. So I did. But I had noticed that people nearly always said the same thing at least three times when they came to see me for a chat, so I would find myself drifting off into luscious thoughts of fresh fish, garlic, and wine, or lamb chops, as I thought of what to have for dinner that night. Or I would think about fishing.
There is nothing quite as wonderful as skimming over a glassy sea with the warm, salty wind in your face and the prospect of catching lunch an hour or so away. Through the heat haze the villages of Kingsand and Cawsand with their pastel painted cottages looked as though they would be more at home on the Amalfi coast, but I used to think that I’d rather be here in Cornwall than Italy any day, because once the attraction of boating had worn off (and it does), you still had the wonderful early evening prospect of a foaming pint of bitter in the local pub, followed by roast beef with Yorkshire pudding (of course) and then Inspector Morse on TV.
I would take a mobile phone the size of a jerrycan (well it was 1984), just in case something really important came up, a bottle of cider and a Cornish pasty as a precaution in case lunch proved reluctant to take the bait. I’d fish for bass, but only ever caught mackerel. Many people regard mackerel as the second-hand Ford Fiesta of the fish world, but they are delicious straight out of the sea, dusted in seasoned flour and fried in butter, with just a smidgen of mustard and a splash of lemon juice—but I digress. As I usually do at the mention of food.
I used to tell my assistant that I was off on a research trip to meet up with a Mr Bass down in Cornwall. Sometimes the phone would ring and on rare occasions it would be John Shearer in Bristol. He was one of my bosses, and although he looked the spitting image of John Denver, many of my fellow producers in the BBC rather unfairly I think, called him Vlad, after the famous Transylvanian prince with a penchant for sticking large nails through the heads of anyone who caused him displeasure—but only when Mr Shearer was well out of earshot. I liked him, because he was so unswerving in his thoughts and didn’t give a fig about tact and diplomacy. He made no secret of the fact that he thought the BBC was stuffed full of somewhat tired (and very often emotional) lacklustre staff who spent far too much time in the BBC Club.
For obvious reasons, his was the last voice I wanted to hear on a bright morning a mile off the Cornish coast, with the sun beating down and the waves gently lapping against the hull. I’d put on my serious voice, and speak quickly so he wouldn’t be able to hear the seagulls mewing overhead, but on one occasion he became suspicious and asked me where I was. I thought of saying I was in a meeting, but I ’d just pulled in six mackerel and they were wriggling and flapping at the bottom of the boat making a terrible din.
‘Well John, since you asked, I’m actually at sea at the moment researching a possible series on fishing in the south-west. It’s a very important industry down here, you know, and it’s been largely ignored.’
Amazingly he told me he thought this was most commendable and wished other producers would get off their arses and get out there to find out what was really going on.
It