and primroses lined the way as we crunched over the gravel that led to the entrance of this imposing Victorian house. Sonia was waiting on the front steps dressed in her chef ’s whites and looking very professional. Warming to the theme of our programme, she said she had chosen to cook hake in a lemon and butter sauce because the Spanish were nicking all these lovely fish from around our coasts and she wanted to show people how good they were. Splendid, said Floyd, rubbing his hands together.
We started to film and suddenly I realized why, until now, all those cookery shows had been recorded in a studio. With four cameras or so you can have a whole assortment of shots, from close-ups of the ingredients to a wide angle of the kitchen, as well as mid-shots of the cook and guest. But where was my one camera supposed to be looking? At Floyd’s face? At his hands? In the cooking pot? Where? The film was rolling through and I kept it on a shot wide enough to see Keith and Sonia plus the fish and the other ingredients. I think I had a touch of ‘rabbit in the headlights’ syndrome.
Apart from making a very short item with Floyd cooking his rabbit dish, I’d never done anything like this before. Fortunately I was saved by the cameraman, Malcolm Baldwin, suggesting that it would be quite a good idea to cut at this point and set up a closer shot of the subject, which was the fish. ‘Ah! I get it,’ I thought, as Sonia started to cut the hake into cutlets—but what happens next? It was a bit like a jigsaw puzzle, except you had to saw out the pieces personally before you began.
Day one of a new series, and technically I wasn’t up to it: it was a pretty cathartic moment for me. I could tell by the way Floyd was looking at me that he knew I’d lost the plot. I could feel the respect levels plummeting and I thought to myself, ‘I wish I hadn’t done this. I wish I hadn’t done this.’ A director has to be in charge, or everything spirals out of control.
I learnt a set of valuable lessons that day and they are: do a thorough ‘recce’ of the location; discuss in detail the actual cooking process, something you should be able to commit to memory; and make sure there’s another stand-in fish and duplicate ingredients so that you can film all the close-ups of the cooking process in beautiful back-lit photography later on. Also, if the camera is stuck on a tripod, there is very little it can do, whereas if it is handheld it becomes the viewer’s eager eye. I just wish someone had told me before. It would have saved so much pain and angst.
Very early in morning after filming at The Horn of Plenty, Keith, me and the crew were on a trawler heading out of Plymouth Sound on our way to the fishing grounds about twenty miles out. I’ve been on many trawlers since and regardless of nationality and age they all seem to smell the same: cigarette smoke, diesel, and a whiff of last week’s fish. There was one more important lesson I had learnt by the end of yesterday’s filming, and that was: as the programme was called Floyd on Fish, it should be Keith doing the cooking, not anyone else, because that’s what I hired him for in the first place. So after filming with Sonia we had visited The Navy, a pub on Plymouth’s Barbican, and held a council of war.
‘When they bring up the net,’ I said to Keith, ‘why don’t you select a lovely fish and cook it on-board for the trawler crew?’ There was a long silence as people thought it over.
‘Let’s get this right,’ said Floyd, pulling on his cigarette. ‘You want me to cook on a trawler. We don’t even know if it has a galley to cook in, let alone any implements.’
That’s true, I thought, but surely they all have galleys because sometimes they’re out there for days, if not a week at a time, and their sandwiches would get mighty stale and curly if they didn’t.
After a while, rather like the doctor in a cowboy film instructing the gunslinger who has to help him deliver a baby in the wilds of Arizona, Floyd said, ‘OK! I’ll need some cream, a skillet, a sharp knife, a spatula, butter, cider, parsley and chives, and you’d better bring a camping stove just in case.’
Now, out in the English Channel on a trawler swaying from side to side in a force-five wind, we waited patiently before we heard the clank of chains and the whine of the winch which signalled the net was about to come aboard. Suddenly, from nowhere, there were dozens of seagulls screeching overhead. This was a really exciting moment because no one knew what the net would contain. It took an age to bring it in and then it was hoisted on a jib above the deck like a giant haggis, swaying and spraying water and smelling of the very essence of the sea. The skipper gave the order to release the cod end—that’s the knot at the bottom of the net—and out spilt a bizarre collection of fish, seaweed, rocks, lots of mud and bits of old motorbikes. Then a hose was turned onto this muddy heap and you could start to see the beautiful fish shining like jewels: hake, scallop shells, a couple of ling, whiting, and pollack and there, in the middle, as ugly as sin, a monkfish.
In the tiny galley barely big enough for two people Floyd was on top form, cooking his monkfish the way they do in Normandy. It didn’t take very long and in a way he began to take over the directing of the scene himself by suggesting to the camera that it would be jolly nice to see the cream go in on a close-up shot so that people could watch it amalgamate with the cider. I couldn’t help notice the faces of the skipper and deckhand as they peered through the window at him from the wheelhouse; they must have thought we were all barking mad. I had to keep my eyes firmly on the horizon, desperately fighting a losing battle against the relentless tide of nausea sweeping over me, as Floyd served the fish up on a plate that had seen better days, and with a couple of forks he found in a drawer, offered it up to the crew to try. It looked good, as good as if it had been prepared in a restaurant in Honfleur. The fish was firm and white and the cider sauce was a velvety pale gold, flecked with green from the herbs. After sampling a mouthful, the fishermen said they liked it, but being fishermen they didn’t enthuse too much. Curiously, it was the first time either of them had tasted monkfish. I had the distinct feeling they would have much preferred a bacon sandwich.
The next day we found ourselves filming in Newlyn fish market. Markets are a joy to film in, because as a general rule fishermen and fish merchants don’t give a tinker’s cuss about being filmed and just get on with the business of making money. There’s a lot of noise and bustle and men with beards and beer bellies who do, however, have a slightly menacing attitude towards incomers. Making a living from the sea is a hard life and if you don’t belong to the fraternity then you don’t really belong here. I think we all sensed this while we were nursing our hangovers and desperately trying to avoid being run over by forklift trucks.
I don’t think it helped that Floyd was wearing a very expensive Burberry trench coat and a brown trilby hat. He looked as if he’d be more at home at Goodwood or Newmarket. We filmed Keith wandering around the boxes of fish, stopping occasionally to pick up a good specimen and put it down, and oddly I noticed that wherever he went he left a trail of fishermen in his wake doubled up with laughter. I knew he was charismatic, but this was extraordinary. These men were normally dour and suspicious, but here they were laughing at whatever Keith was saying (which I couldn’t hear because I didn’t have headphones on). Then I realized what had caused such mirth. Someone had stuck a label on the back of his expensive raincoat saying ‘fresh prick’.
I could hardly breathe for laughing so much but Floyd really didn’t find it funny at all. In fact, he looked quite hurt. When I’d finally stopped laughing I suggested that Keith should tell the audience what kind of unusual fish there were in the market that morning, preferably fish the merchants couldn’t sell in England and were shipping off to Spain and France instead. I should have known that Keith hates to be made a fool of and will always try to get his own back in any way he can.
Once the camera was rolling he picked up a red mullet and said what wonderful fish these were; in France they were highly revered and they called them the woodcock of the sea, because like woodcock, they were cooked with their guts intact. He then went on to talk about other fish that we as a nation ignore, preferring the safer options of cod, plaice, and haddock. Finally he took a fish I’d never seen before. It was a handsome browny-green fish with a spiky, lethal-looking