pedestrianized zone of cheap low-rise buildings, the result during the last war of the Luftwaffe bombing every structure that had some architectural merit. While it had been uplifting to spend a lunch hour in Bristol, walking down the lovely Park Street, here all I saw were swathes of people dawdling along the pavements, dressed in track-suits and munching on Cornish pasties from paper bags.
The best bit of Plymouth by far was the Barbican, and the best bit of the Barbican was the fish market, right next to the old harbour where the Mayflower sailed to the New World. Plymouth has a new, much smarter fish market these days, where members of the public are not particularly welcome, which is an enormous pity, but in the early Eighties Brussels and all its Health and Safety brigades hadn’t put Plymouth on its list of things to do. Most of the fish merchants had cigarettes stuck in the corners of their mouths as they slid their filleting knives swiftly over the framework of bones.
Hogarth and his sketchbook wouldn’t have looked too out of place in the old fish market. I’d very often see a man inspecting the fish, dressed like Sir Francis Drake in doublet and hose, with a well-trimmed beard and a natty little hat. He looked quite at home among the glistening cobblestones. Apparently he would take groups of schoolchildren around the narrow streets that led down to the harbour and he’d bring to life those days of the Armada, pox, and rum. Occasionally I’d see him in Sainsbury’s with his flashy rings and buckles and a large cutlass swinging from his hip. It was an odd sight to see such a figure reading the small print on a pot of yoghurt.
I loved that fish market, awash with water and ice and disdainful looking seagulls strutting around the fish boxes looking for a tasty morsel. In the winter I ’d buy the finest lemon soles for supper. They were firm and thick and landed just a few hours before and they smelt sweetly of the sea itself. In the summer I’d buy turbot and red mullet and it was on one of those fish-buying trips that the proverbial light bulb went on and completely changed my life for ever.
The fish merchants were true artists of the knife, leaving not a scintilla of wasted flesh behind as they filleted their fish; but they tended to be grumpy until they got to know you. One day when I was shopping there, Fred Brimmacombe, a fish merchant who wore a sailor’s hat with so many badges on it you could hardly see the cloth, was having a bit of a rant.
‘All people in this country want is cod, plaice and ’addock.’ He started to point with his razor-sharp filleting knife. ‘All these red mullet, all these cuttlefish, these ’ere gurnards, is all shipped over to Spain.’ Fred was getting a bit cross now, walking across the slippery fish boxes, balancing on their edges like an angry seal. ‘The mentality over ’ere is, if we don’t bloody well know what these fish are, we don’t bloody eat ’em. It’s a bloody shame. It breaks my ’eart it does, to see all this good fish sent over there to arrive three or four days later in some bloody Spanish port, way past its prime. It’s a national disgrace it is. It really bloody is.’
What an interesting subject, I thought. Here we had all these lovely fish arriving as fresh as daisies and we were selling them to the Spanish and also the French because we didn’t fancy eating them ourselves. Could it be that as an island we were a bunch of fish haters because in days past fish was just too plentiful? I could remember when I came home from school and the house used to stink of fish because my mother boiled cod shoulders for the cat’s tea. It put me off fish for years.
But thanks to Fred Brimmacombe, I knew what my new programme was going to be about. It was going to be an evangelical food programme led by my very own Billy Graham, the man I’d met many months earlier in a Bristol restaurant. I could see Keith Floyd as the fishermen’s champion, showing the people at home how silly it was to export all this fresh, cheap fish to the Continent when we should be eating it ourselves. And this wouldn’t be a five-minute flash in the pan wedged between a rock band and a film on the architecture of Swindon. This would be a whole programme devoted to this dreadful waste of a precious resource. It might even be a series.
Maybe I should nip up to Bristol now to see Keith for a drink and start making plans, I thought. But the turbot looked far too good. I imagined it gently poached in a court bouillon for fifteen minutes or so and then served with hollandaise, new potatoes, and watercress. Maybe I’d see him tomorrow.
When we met again Floyd had lost a bit of his sparkle. He was in the kitchen of his bistro on the phone and having a difficult time judging by the way he was dragging on his cigarette. I gathered from the bits of conversation I was trying not to hear that he was immersed in financial difficulties, and from what I could glean, the person on the other end of the phone was refusing to deliver any more produce until the bill was settled. It was a painful telephone call which had gone well beyond that old familiar stopgap of ‘a cheque is in the post’. I wished I had arrived a bit later because he looked completely dejected as he put the receiver down, and not at all like the swaggering adjutant I’d seen all those months before.
He was in the middle of cooking freshwater crayfish and I’d never set eyes on one before. What beautifully designed things they were, rather like cherry-red Matchbox edition toy lobsters crossed with JCBs. They were being extremely aggressive to each other and I could imagine that if they were the size of dachshunds they’d take over the world. I discovered over lunch they also tasted wonderful, like sweet nutty shrimps. Floyd didn’t eat very much. He was drinking large Scotches with lots of ice and puffing away on endless cigarettes, detailing his thoughts on why the British people have no respect for good food, while the French revere it.
I toyed with the idea of contradicting him by pointing to the hillock of discarded crayfish shells on my plate, compared to his rather full ashtray, but thought it best not to. It dawned on me at the time that one of the differences between a gourmand and a gourmet might well be this: a gourmet is someone with a relatively small appetite and an academic interest in food, who’d rather talk about it than eat it; a gourmand relishes the infinite joys and pleasures of eating.
During lunch we discussed filming, money, locations, dishes. In fact, the money was a bit of a sticking point because everyone at that time assumed television had money to burn, after all it was seen as a glamorous industry. But regional television, along with local radio, was the church mouse of the BBC and the budgets reflected that. Two thousand pounds was all I had to make each half-hour programme of Floyd on Fish, a programme destined to be shown in the south-west only. This meagre budget had to pay for Keith, the film crew, travel and accommodation, film stock and hospitality, which inevitably included many bottles of wine. My salary and the post production costs like editing and dubbing were excluded from that sum. This was 1984. To make a similar programme today you’d have to multiply that figure by twenty-five at least.
Am I supposed to rehearse this? And do I need more than one fish?
I used to have a recurring nightmare while learning the rudiments of rugby at school. I found the rules of rugby union extremely complicated, especially things like the offside regulation, and the fact that you had to pass the ball backwards to your teammates seemed totally unnatural. It seemed to me the game would be so much more interesting if you were allowed to throw the ball forwards. And as for scrums; what on earth was that all about? In my nightmare I would find myself playing for the England Colts at Twickenham, with the stands packed with young enthusiasts. I’d be fortunate enough to catch a high pass but would find myself stopping for a few moments to decide what to do. Should I run with the ball? Should I pass it back or kick it forward? In the meantime a whole mountain of flesh from the opposing side would fall on me and afterwards the scorn of the crowd and fellow members of my team would sound like 10,000 baying wolves. ‘Look,’ I would say, standing alone on the pitch, ‘this is very complicated. I was just trying to decide what was the best thing to do.’ Such was my quandary now.
Our very first location was at a fine restaurant in Devon called the Horn of Plenty and it was run by Sonia Stevenson, a lively woman with a cut-glass accent and a deep passion for food. She said she first wanted to be a cook when she started to make mud pies with her friends as a child. An assistant producer at Plymouth, Jeremy Mills, suggested we shoot there because of her formidable reputation as a cook.
Floyd