for less than a pound a head quite tiresome and typical of some left-wing television producer who knew nothing about food. (He called me left wing. I felt quite proud. I’d never been called that before.) I should have seen the warning signs then.
That was how our first filming session started. The rabbit dish was superb and there was loads left over. Was there rabbit with wild mushrooms, simmered gently in white wine, on the menu that night at Floyd’s Bistro for a modest twelve pounds or so? I wonder. The filming wasn’t terribly good, but Floyd did say one thing that day I’ll never forget—that cooking was the new rock ‘n’ roll.
‘Cooks on television,’ he pronounced, ‘could be as famous as rock musicians and racing car drivers.’
I didn’t believe him at the time, but I do now.
Twenty-five years ago no one could have foreseen the incredible popularity commanded by food programmes on television today. Now we have a whole army of chefs representing virtually every personality trait. Sexy, aggressive, posh, young, practical, not so young, pioneering, grumpy, scientific, philosophical, funny—and then, of course, Delia.
In the late Seventies and early Eighties there were many programmes about food and cookery on television but they were mostly huddled together on BBC2. Fanny Cradock and her poor downtrodden husband Johnny, along with her young traumatized assistants, were on our screens for years doing mind-boggling things with coloured piped mashed potato. I found it impossible to think of her as a happy fulfilled woman. She looked as if she’d spent the night crying her heart out and had hurriedly and, not too expertly, applied some extra makeup before walking into the studio. I watched her not so much for the culinary tips, but because I liked seeing her berate her monocle-wearing husband for getting in the way.
Then there were the mellifluous tones of the highly respected Derek Cooper introducing the viewers to his world of cooking. Marguerite Patten popped up from time to time. I regard her as the matriarch of all television cooking shows. Madhur Jaffrey hit the gastronomic bull’s eye by teaching us how to make a proper curry using fenugreek and tamarind. Ken Hom did more for the wok-making industry than Chairman Mao and the exotic Robert Carrier taught us about tagines and couscous from his home in Morocco. Glynn Christian, a direct descendant of the famous Fletcher who cut the intolerant Captain Bligh adrift in the South Seas, entertained us for a while before drifting off himself somewhere I know not where. It was a pretty crowded house but through it all Delia’s star got brighter and brighter. And years later, even when she boiled an egg, over three million people tuned in to see it wobbling around in a saucepan of simmering water—hoping, no doubt, it would be as hard as rock when she cracked it open. Like many a male viewer I found her quite sexy, but a bit schoolmarmish (maybe that was the attraction), and her food looked appetizing. Clearly she was someone the viewer could trust, like the sensible girl next door who does shopping for elderly neighbours. Inexplicably I had an overriding sensation that she was standing on casters and being pulled around the television studio on a long piece of string by a member of the production team, and that as soon as she stopped filming she’d crack open a bottle of white, open up the Silk Cut and put on Led Zeppelin.
There were so many cooking programmes in the early Eighties that journalists started to get quite cross about them. ‘Not another one!’ they would cry. ‘Surely enough’s enough?’
But Floyd was different. Until then, cookery on television was really aimed at women. When Floyd came on to our screens he gave men a clear and open invitation to get into the kitchen and have a go for themselves. Forget about exact ingredients, pour yourself a glass of wine and relax. Peel a couple of cloves of garlic and make the whole cooking experience far more enjoyable than going out to a restaurant.
Floyd made it OK for blokes in pubs to have conversations about chillies and coriander, and what’s more, he cut down the fences that surrounded this relatively safe field of TV cookery shows, letting in what was to build up into a stampede of new, strange, and sometimes dangerous animals. Now cookery shows have spilt over from BBC2 onto Channel 4 and ITV where a healthy dollop of testosterone and foul language make them ‘showbiz’. Add to that a smidgen of threatened violence, and it becomes almost gladiatorial. The boundaries are being shifted every few weeks with the likes of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Jamie Oliver highlighting the unsavoury practices of factory farming and alerting the nation to an epidemic of fat schoolchildren. These TV chefs have become more effective and powerful than a roomful of MPs, and I’m talking about a pretty big room here.
I read somewhere that the excellent Anthony Worrall Thompson said that we all got our TV careers because of Floyd. I know that it was Keith Floyd who inspired a very young Jamie Oliver to be a chef. Floyd was right. Cooks have become as famous as racing drivers and rock musicians, probably even more so.
But none of this had happened yet. The programme with Floyd and his very expensive rabbit dish was shown on RPM sandwiched between a Stranglers’ concert and a Sixties guide to the West Country presented by that wonderful writer and broadcaster Ray Gosling; a world of Teddy Boys, street parties, frothy coffee, mini skirts, skiffle and scooters, interspersed with a host of curious and quirky items from the BBC’s treasure trove of old news films. It would be an understatement to say Floyd didn’t fit in terribly well, and many people told me so, including my boss.
‘What on earth has that idiot cooking a rabbit got to do with the programme?’ he asked.
I thought about it for some time, but I couldn’t really come up with an answer. It was nearly a year before I was to meet up with Floyd again.
In the meantime, I went off around Britain with that eccentric Liverpudlian Beryl Bainbridge, following in the footsteps of J. B. Priestley’s English Journey. I learnt a lot from her; not least how to drink large ‘Rusty Nails’, a mixture of whisky and Drambuie.
There was a memorable moment when we arrived in her home town and she led us down a street where the houses were all boarded up, ready for demolition. She looked up at one of them and said, ‘David, that’s where I was brought up.’
We had to film this poignant moment, I thought. So we pulled the corrugated iron off one of the windows and climbed into this scene of devastation. There were daubings on the wall and unmentionable things on the floor; some of the boards had been ripped up to make a fire. I could see she was moved to tears as we walked through the house, through the front room where, she said, her mum and dad used to argue, while she would be upstairs listening. We climbed the stairs, looked into her bedroom, and her eyes were welling up. She lit several cigarettes and stared wistfully out at the backyard, all tumbled down and covered in stinging nettles and overgrown weeds. Eventually we climbed out of the window and she stood there looking back at the house. I found the whole thing terribly moving, and I told her so.
Then she turned to me and said, ‘David, it wasn’t that house. It was the one next door.’
The owl and the pussy cat went to sea—eventually
From time to time at the BBC you were encouraged to apply for another job. I think it was a measure adopted by large organizations to avoid complacency. Jimmy Dewar, my irascible and generous boss in Bristol, thought it the most sensible thing to do.
‘Look at it this way,’ he said, pouring me a large gin and tonic. ‘You’ll be seen as someone who wants to get on in life and to develop other skills. And, anyway, there are quite a few applicants for the Plymouth job so the chances are that you won’t get it.’
‘What if I do get it and say I’ve had a change of heart?’ He gave me one of those looks that Captain Mainwaring usually reserves for Private Pike.
It was a bit of a shock leaving Bristol to move to Plymouth and take up my new job as features editor there. I remember Alan Clark, the diarist and MP, saying the best view of Plymouth was in the rear-view mirror of his Porsche as he went hell for leather back home to Kent. The centre of the city is improving now and promises to be a mini version of Barcelona in five years’ time—both cities have the sea in common—but back in the early Eighties it