Shooting the Cook
David Pritchard
The true story of a bumbling and undistinguished television producer who inadvertently changed the landscape of cookery programmes forever to give rise to the world of the 'celebrity chef'.As the producer behind the phenomenally successful Keith Floyd and Rick Stein BBC cookery programmes, David Pritchard tells the tale of the ascent of the chef celebre. 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 single personality trait from sexy to aggressive, to young and experimental. But back then, charismatic, erratic, always happy to have a slurp of wine or two and not afraid to say exactly what he thought on air, Floyd was a revelation. This was a chef that television had not seen the like of before. Freed from the constraints of studio filming, Floyd brought us the idea of cooking on location, but most importantly, he simply invited viewers to have fun and enjoy being in the kitchen.Shooting the Cook divulges the stories of what went on behind the scenes to the groundbreaking television that inspired the event of modern television chefs as we understand them today. David Pritchard shares the overwhelming excitement that went into making the early Floyd series - from sitting down to a silver service dinner aboard a tiny fishing trawler heading out of the Plymouth Sound, to attempting abortive hot-air balloon adventures over Alsace.Tangled up amid the tales of the bust-ups, the botched camera shots and the exquisite regional food are reminisces also about the David's life growing up in ration-starved, post-war Britain. Also containing snapshots of life behind the scenes of Sixties television making and spanning the era from when avocados were virtually unheard of to a time where the term 'foodie' has gaining an almost cult-like status, this is an outstanding memoir from the producer who single-handedly changed the face of food as we know it today.
DAVID PRITCHARD
SHOOTING
THE COOK
A TRUE STORY ABOUT FOOD, TELEVISION AND THE
RISE OF TV’S SUPERCHEFS—THE DIRECTOR’S CUT
To Jane, who forced me to write this; to Prudence, my English bull terrier, for being such an inspiration on walks, and to my mother, who is the best cook in the world.
Over the years there has been the odd fleeting moment when I’d have eagerly swapped the camera for a revolver.
Contents
Foreword (#u7e645a42-a785-5546-af30-f0f470903f24)
PART I (#ua56495c8-9c21-5c03-afbb-88f015d19b1b)
Chapter 1-A recipe for disaster (#u786b288d-344e-5c0b-a36c-5d5571d8aab7)
Chapter 2-Peking duck heaven (#u9d49159e-7b1d-5f0a-a58a-388bc4664521)
Chapter 3-David believe me, cooking’s the new rock ‘n’ roll (#u8beb3b5a-1941-5750-b04d-f3a65f9c0cfc)
Chapter 4-The owl and the pussy cat went to sea—eventually (#ua2d98104-7403-5c7d-8fb5-c1414af0b48b)
Chapter 5-Am I supposed to rehearse this? And do I need more than one fish? (#u2e95913c-54f4-5c9f-9289-22e3cf5e9afc)
Chapter 6-Old dogs can learn new tricks (#ud949a2d9-bc96-505f-8473-665f32c5cb98)
Chapter 7-Fair stood the wind for France (#ufb045d01-0c4d-5c0c-bc57-f355cd89a454)
Chapter 8-Over here, Clive (#u0770b08c-1436-56c9-8afe-a68556bb56be)
PART II (#u09edc77f-ad78-5902-b13a-e4c71cbe809b)
Chapter 9-Just for starters (#u793e31cb-ba7a-5966-aed8-e9728be84b04)
Chapter 10-Is there anything better than jam roly-poly? (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11-The best of British (#litres_trial_promo)
PART III (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12-Panzer division (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13-Spag bol and all that (#litres_trial_promo)
PART IV (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14-Proof of the pudding (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15-If you don’t get this series on the network, David, I’m going to come down to Plymouth and shoot you! (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16-What is a script? (#litres_trial_promo)
PART V (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17-Early rumblings (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18-Bungalow days (#litres_trial_promo)
PART VI (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19-Lost in France (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20-A week in Provence (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21-Forty cloves of garlic anyone? (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22-The pelican (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23-The old battleaxe (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24-Through a glass darkly (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25-When the balloon goes up (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26-Please sir, the dog ate my homework (#litres_trial_promo)
PART VII (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27-A slice of American pie (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28-Apocalypse any minute (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29-Be my buddy, Holly (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30-Anyone can be a TV cook (#litres_trial_promo)
PART VIII (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31-There comes a tide in the affairs of man (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32-Fear and loathing in Benidorm (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 33-The end is nigh (#litres_trial_promo)
PART IX (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 34-The world of Rick Stein (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 35-Filmingland (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 36-The odd couple (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 37-La dolce vita? (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 38-The Emperor’s clothes (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 39-‘Mind the…!’ (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 40-Cabin fever (#litres_trial_promo)
PART X (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 41-Reunited (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 42-Déjà vu (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Foreword (#uc9acbf52-6f67-5e88-b30b-a3412d6e89cb)
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
PART I (#uc9acbf52-6f67-5e88-b30b-a3412d6e89cb)
A recipe for disaster (#uc9acbf52-6f67-5e88-b30b-a3412d6e89cb)
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 was after one of these delightful fishing trips that I returned to the studio in Plymouth and was making my way to my office when I heard the strains of the Stranglers’ classic song, ‘Peaches’. The studio, with its imposing veranda, lawns, and rosebushes, reminded me of one of those convalescence homes you saw in black and white films about recuperating fighter pilots and torpedoed seamen that were so popular in the Fifties. I could easily imagine nurses in starched white summer uniforms wheeling the staff about in the lovely gardens and bringing them cups of tea. Appearances can often be misleading though, because in these sedate surroundings the likes of Angela Rippon, Sue Lawley, and Jill Dando started their illustrious broadcasting careers. Like any television station, no matter how small, it was full of talented people keen to progress in the industry, tempered with a sprinkling of those whose love affair with television had finished a long time ago and who were now longing for a caravan in Brittany. I wasn’t quite sure where in this scenario I fitted in.
The sound of the Stranglers was coming from the technical area where they recorded and transferred programmes onto videotape. I had chosen this brilliant song to end a brand new series that I’d made, but was as yet unseen, called Floyd on Fish. I saw this as an antidote to all those rather starchy and clinical studio-based shows in which all the ingredients were measured out in teaspoons or carefully weighed, and they always had a finished dish they’d made earlier.
I’d never had so much fun making a television programme before and after long sunny days of filming, my ribs used to ache from laughing so much.
On one of the many screens in the room I could see that the end credits were running. They were superimposed over a shot of Keith Floyd, with a very young-looking Rick Stein, sitting down with full silver service on white linen, laid out on the deck of a trawler. It had all seemed like such a brilliant idea and I felt extremely pleased with myself as I entered the room. I didn’t have a clue how all this technical stuff worked but I thought it would be quite interesting to see what my very first programme for BBC South West looked like on a real telly, rather than an editing machine.
‘What a load of crap!’ was the first utterance I heard coming from an open talkback (this is a microphone and speaker system, which lets people in the recording studio communicate with people in the control room).
Greg, the video operator, went to switch it off but as I was nearer to the speaker I stopped him.
‘This is probably the worst programme ever to come out of Plymouth,’ said another voice.
‘That bloke’s pissed out of his head. It’s insulting.’
‘It’s a disgrace. It shouldn’t be allowed,’ said another.
Well I think there were a few more comments, but by then I felt as if my shiny brand new Spitfire was crashing down to earth with all my ammo used up and black smoke streaming from the engine cowling.
I could recognize nearly all of the voices. They belonged mostly to engineering staff, whom I’d see often in the BBC bar after work. Greg looked very embarrassed and kept finding interesting things to look at through the window. I put on one of my best smiles, the sort that says, ‘Hey, am I worried? I really do appreciate these thoughts. You’ve been most honest and I’ll bear your criticisms in mind…When I come round to your house and set fire to it.’
I was smiling so much my face hurt but on the inside I was unsettled and a trifle scared. Maybe I had been too cavalier, too much under the spell of the mercurial Mr Floyd? All this time I’d been happily filming away at wonderful locations in the south-west without a care in the world. We’d eaten well, drunk rather too much, and probably in the process I’d created a false sense of euphoria. Now, I wondered to myself, if it really is as bad as they say, how could I possibly get something so wrong? I’d probably have to resign and become a freelance, or, worse, be faced with the sack. My mother would be horrified, not to mention my wife and daughter and the Bradford and Bingley. And this would mean no more expensive, over the top food shopping. Bye, bye Scottish sirloin and Gevrey Chambertin—not that I saw very much of you. Adieu roast goose washed down with a serious bottle of Pauillac—well that was only for birthdays really. Cheerio to all the lovely things I love so much, especially lobster, turbot and Iberico ham—although you were strictly for high days and holidays. I would be entering a bleak world where no doubt I’d have to beg a commissioning editor half my age to grant me the opportunity to make a film about the state of rural transport in north Devon.
The last time something like this had happened to me was in 1978, when I’d made a new series for the BBC in Bristol. It was called RPM and it was about pop music, architecture, real ale, and lots of other stuff—basically things that I and my small production team found interesting. It was new, it was vibrant—or so I thought—and it was due to run for thirteen weeks. I had high hopes for it.
A day or so after the first transmission they started to appear. ‘They’ were pinned on the notice board outside the canteen, up and down the corridors, outside the studios, everywhere. ‘They’ were cuttings from the Bath Chronicle and they carried a searing review of my very first programme. The headline in the television section screeched something like, ‘Is this the worst television programme ever made by BBC Bristol?’ Clearly someone who didn’t care for the programme, or more likely, me, had been busy scampering around the studios with a roll of Sellotape.
Well, of course, I read the review—and then I read it again—desperately looking for something good that would stand out. I was searching for words like ‘innovative’ and ‘brave’, but the more I read it, the more I realized that the only good thing in there was the question mark. Something deep inside me told me not to touch these critiques that seemed to be everywhere; leave them where they were, and after a few weeks they’d shrivel up to brittle pieces of unreadable parchment, fall off and float away like autumn leaves, never to be seen again. As it happened RPM went on to be a big success and ran for eight years.
Over the years I had decided that there are four ingredients in the cocktail that is essential to the well-being of any television producer or director. One: an enquiring mind. Two (not surprisingly): imagination. Three: loads of passion. Four (and this was the big one): a total belief that whatever you do is going to be a resounding success. Optimism plays a large part in a director’s bag of tricks. I’ve known directors waxing lyrical about the dullest of concepts. One of my friends spent over four years making a film about the construction of the Scottish Parliament building and he was as passionate about it as if he was making Life on Earth. I suppose in 400 years’ time it might be quite interesting to see.
Also, I strongly believed in regional broadcasting, and still do, despite the fact that it has often been decimated over the last few years. I know that many executives and programme makers at the BBC in London think of the staff in the regions as rather like irritating sand fleas, but I see regional TV as a great place to experiment with new talent. Floyd, I thought, would never get off the ground in London. Most food programmes in those days came under the auspices of the Education Department and Floyd certainly wouldn’t have made for a good proposal on paper. I could imagine a committee discussing the glasses of wine and the haranguing of the cameraman. I’m a great optimist, but I don’t think they were quite ready for a culinary version of Reginald Bosanquet.
No, my plan was to make the programme with Floyd first and let the great and the good decide afterwards whether it worked or not. After all, as BBC features editor for the south-west, I was lucky enough to be my very own commissioning editor. So I didn’t have to convince anyone, except myself, which was why, that afternoon, I was sitting on a train on the way to London, running scared.
The only thing to do in a situation like this, I had decided, was to consult someone whose opinion I really treasured. This could be a pretty risky strategy, but I was desperate, because I had already commissioned myself to make a further five programmes with Keith Floyd. I was on my way to seek the opinion of one of the most talented producers in the land at the time, my good friend and mentor, John Purdie. John made the award-winning fly on the wall series Sailor, filmed on the aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal.
Armed with a video cassette and a bottle of champagne bought from an off-licence in Chelsea, I arrived at John’s houseboat on the Thames. When he opened the door his little beady eyes lit up at the sight of the rather handsome bottle of Mumm. There are times when John reminds me of Captain Pugwash. He’s even got a parrot.
In the snug sitting room on the barge I told John what I’d heard on the open talkback in the videotape room earlier in the day. I couldn’t help but think that, for all our friendship, he was secretly enjoying my moment of intense insecurity. ‘Schadenfreude’, that lovely German word, is alive and well and thrives in the world of television. Although they pretend otherwise, television people love it when one of their friends makes an absolute turkey of a programme. After reading and savouring every ounce of vitriol in the newspaper reviews, they say things like, ‘I haven’t actually seen the programme but I’ve got it recorded and I’ve heard some good things about it. Is there anything in the papers?’
John covered the parrot’s cage with a grey blanket. In my paranoia I thought it was because the parrot might leap from his perch and start stomping around the bottom of his cage shouting out what a load of crap my programme was, but I was assured it was only in order to have an uninterrupted viewing. I charged our glasses, lit a cigarette and waited while the video clock ticked its way to zero.
The opening titles saw our chef quaffing a glass of wine aboard various boats and fishing on the Somerset Levels, cooking and laughing his head off. All this joyous imagery was accompanied by the Stranglers anarchic ‘Waltz in Black’. John watched unblinkingly, giving nothing away.
All television editors, directors and producers hate ‘viewings’, the tense affair when the commissioning editor or head of department casts their judgemental eye on a production that has inevitably taken months of blood, sweat and tears to create. Copious note-making by the boss is usually a serious sign of failure, spelling grim and uncertain times ahead for the producer and director.
I noticed that John had hardly touched his glass of champagne while I’d nearly finished the whole bottle, a most unusual state of affairs. But at least he wasn’t making notes. Eventually, shortly after the scene where Keith Floyd says to the cameraman, ‘Look, don’t put the camera on me. Put it down there on the blinking scallops. Don’t you understand, you idiot…it’s all about food? You simply can’t get trained staff these days!’ the screen went blank. John had switched the recording off. It was supposed to run for half an hour but after twelve minutes or so it seemed that my friend and mentor had had enough.
Peking duck heaven (#uc9acbf52-6f67-5e88-b30b-a3412d6e89cb)
I think it’s worth a small gastronomic detour at this point to explain why John’s opinion mattered so much.
I first worked with him in Hong Kong in 1976 making a series about the police called The Hong Kong Beat. He was a highly respected director and I was his researcher. Until then I hadn’t been further than Lloret de Mar on a Club 18–30 holiday, so this hot and steamy colony in the South China Sea came as a bit of a shock—an extremely pleasant one. When we weren’t in the back of police Land Rovers hoping for murder and mayhem (sadly I’m ashamed to say this is true) we would be in the street food markets that surrounded our hotel in Kowloon. I’ve been back to Hong Kong since and most of these street stalls have been swept away, but back then they were everywhere. For me they were the main attraction of the place, along with the Star Ferries which plied their way between Hong Kong Island and the mainland.
There was so much to choose from at the markets. Red ducks dripping with fat, and hunks of pork, the crackling cooked to golden perfection, hung from the frames of ramshackle counters. We’d normally be served by unsmiling, crew-cutted old men tossing a whole variety of vegetables and noodles in huge woks that, now and again, briefly caught fire. The stoves roared like jet engines, pushing out tremendous heat, so everything cooked quickly, which, of course, is the whole secret of this style of cooking; and the food was so cheap. Our mouths watered so much with anticipation that it became impossible to talk without spraying each other. This was the most delicious food I had ever tasted, and the combination of spicy noodles, crispy green vegetables, pork, duck, and prawns was light years away from any Chinese takeaway I’d ever had back home.
John was a true trencherman and like me had a ferocious appetite. Sometimes in the car driving back from filming in the New Territories, the country area by what was then the Chinese border, we would make up songs about how hungry we were. One day, John, in his soft Scottish burr told me about a restaurant he’d been to where the speciality was Peking duck. He described what he’d eaten: the soft pancakes smeared with plum sauce, the sweet crispy skin of the duck and the crunchy match-sticks of cucumber and spring onions. The way he described it, he had to take me to this restaurant now. Nothing else would do.
It was called the American Restaurant and it was everything John said it was. Although it was very early in the evening, the place was packed. Waiters wearing white gloves were carving huge golden brown ducks at the tables and the bamboo steamers they carried past us left a waft of sweet smelling dough in their wake. By the time a waiter came to take our order I was nearly passing out with hunger. John explained that we each wanted a duck and the full order of pancakes and the other accompaniments that go with it.
‘No,’ said the waiter, rather curtly I thought. ‘You cannot have one duck each. You can only have one duck for two.’
John looked at him and explained we were both extremely hungry and that one duck would not be enough. Unfortunately this only made the waiter angry.
‘One duck enough.’
He began to write the order down on his pad which upset my friend John enormously. ‘He want duck,’ he said, pointing to me, ‘and I want duck.’
I nodded appreciatively and tried to give the impression that one duck to us would be no more than a mouthful.
It seemed we had reached an impasse and I was beginning to think that we were about to get unceremoniously chucked out of the best Peking duck restaurant in the world.
‘Get me the manager,’ said John.
‘Why don’t we just have one duck and share it?’ I ventured helpfully. ‘And if we’re still hungry we could ask for another one.’
John gave me the kind of stare you get from the Scots when you unwittingly mistake them for Celtic instead of Rangers supporters and vice versa.
The manager arrived and was charm personified. He explained that the restaurant had been there since the war serving Peking duck and as far as he knew no one had ever ordered a duck each before. And so that evening John and I made history. They had to put another table next to ours to carve these enormous ducks which looked more like geese. I’m sure they found the two biggest birds in the kitchen to teach us a lesson. The waiters expertly separated the skin from the caramel coloured-flesh and left mountains of each before taking the carcasses away for the chefs to make soup.
‘Make soup?’ I said, looking at the piles of duck and the steamers full of pancakes.
‘Yes,’ said our grumpy waiter, but now he was smiling. ‘First you have duck with pancakes and then you have duck soup. That’s why one duck enough.’
Unfazed by this news, John showed me the art of making and rolling the perfect duck pancake: sauce first then a sprinklng of cucumber and spring onion, then equal portions of skin and meat, all rolled up like a cigar. Crunch. It was sweet and crispy with a lovely aftertaste of duck fat. Soon it became a race and by the time we had counted twenty pancakes each, a dogged silence prevailed. Over an hour later we were still eating. Our appetites had been sated long ago, but we both knew we must devour every morsel.
The pancakes finished, out came the bowls of soup, which were huge and challenging and eventually they beat us. However, the manager and the waiters seemed transformed and treated us with great civility when we eventually left the restaurant and wobbled out into the warm steamy night. Maybe, thirty years later, the staff still recount the story of the Englishman and the Scotsman who had one duck each but couldn’t quite finish the soup.
So that is why the opinion of my friend was so important to me. Not only did John understand the world of television but food is his passion.
Now, I sat on his houseboat dreading his verdict. He turned to me and said rather gravely, ‘We’ve just got enough time to buy another bottle of fizz before they close, because this is going to be a hit!’
Early next morning I caught the first train back to Plymouth and in four hours or so I was walking up the very same corridor that had seemed so gloomy yesterday. People were making their way to the canteen. I saw the usual faces grouped around their usual tables—engineers at one end of the room, journalists and features staff at the other. I recognized the four, or was it five, engineers who had painted such a bleak picture of my efforts. But that was yesterday. Such a very long time ago, and today I was happy and probably a little hung over from the night before. I was up in the world of sun-split clouds in my Spitfire again, the Merlin engine purring like a contented tiger, the wings full of ammo and down below me, clearly outlined against the silver sea, four, or was it five, Heinkel bombers, as fat as turkeys, were making their way home…or so they thought. I pushed the stick forward and flipped the safety off.
‘I think I’ll have a nice cup of tea, Mrs Boggis, and one of your finest cheese scones, a nice warm one straight from the oven please.’
David believe me, cooking’s the new rock ‘n’ roll (#uc9acbf52-6f67-5e88-b30b-a3412d6e89cb)
Floyd’s Bistro in Bristol had a real touch of class. It was 1982, before the days of open-plan kitchens, white walls, washed wood, and chrome. Floyd’s little restaurant smelt right, rather like those wonderful cafés du commerce that adorn any self-respecting market town in France. As soon as you opened the door you were greeted with a waft of good coffee, hot butter with a touch of garlic, and just a hint of Gauloise, Floyd’s cigarette of choice. It even had a real grumpy French waiter, who looked like a consumptive Bryan Ferry. On one wall was a mounted head of a huge antelope or it might have been a gnu, its long horns festooned with hats and umbrellas. The Bistro was packed when we got there and we were shown to our table in the middle of the room.
I’d been tipped-off about Mr Floyd by Andy Batten-Foster, the presenter of RPM, which had been running for four years now. Andy had met Floyd before, in a Berni Inn, which might sound strange but there was nothing wrong with a Berni Inn in those days: a prawn cocktail, a decent steak, and black forest gateau, thank you. He really liked Keith and thought he’d be good to have on the programme. However, the thing that most impressed him was that a waitress had spilt a glass of red wine over the brand new Burberry trench coat that Floyd had bought that day and worn for the first time that evening. He was clearly proud of it because he didn’t want to take it off. But he didn’t bat an eyelid. Staring at the red stain he just said, ‘Gracious me my dear, I wouldn’t worry about that—all it needs is a damp cloth and it’ll be fine.’ But deep inside, Andy knew he was crying.
Andy had been talking to me for ages about Floyd’s Bistro. Apparently he’d been once before when Floyd sent a table of four packing because they insisted on ordering well done steaks. In so many words Keith told his wide-eyed audience that his entrecôtes were of the finest quality, from pedigree cattle reared on lush Somerset meadows blessed with crystal streams and he was fucked if he was going to cook them well done thank you very much. He showed them the door and suggested if they hurry they might just make the Wimpy before it closed.
On another occasion a regular customer complained that his Wiener schnitzel, a thin escalope of veal dipped in egg and breadcrumbs, was really tough. Floyd came out of the kitchen, personally apologized to the man and took his plate away saying as he retreated that the most perfect Wiener schnitzel would be coming up any minute. Down in the kitchen Floyd was reputed to have cut a couple of beer mats roughly into the shape of schnitzels, soaked them in a little white wine to soften, rubbed them with garlic butter, seasoned them and dipped them in egg and breadcrumbs, and popped the lot into hot olive oil. The man ate it uncomplaining while Floyd, glass in hand, watched him joyously devour every mouthful. Such was the reputation of the man. Floyd offered a little bit of theatre in a rather staid part of Bristol. No wonder the place was packed.
On the night I went for dinner I can’t remember who I was with but, such are my priorities, I do remember what I ate. We had clams followed by steak frites and a bottle of the house red. Because we were late arriving, it wasn’t long before Keith made an appearance from his hot kitchen. He walked among the tables like an adjutant surveying the recruits’ canteen, asking the occasional customer if everything was to their liking. He started chatting to an expensively dressed couple sitting at a table underneath the gnu or ibex or whatever it was. They had parked their new Porsche on the pavement outside and were spending much of their time admiring it. Without asking, Floyd helped himself to a large glass of their wine and then in a loud voice apologized for not having any scampi in the basket left because the Bristol Estate Agents Fine Dining Club had been in at lunchtime and scoffed the lot along with all the Blue Nun he had in the house. They thought this very funny and so did the rest of the diners. Who would he pick on next?
He reminded me of Graham Kerr of Galloping Gourmet fame. This was an imported series from New Zealand shown on the BBC in the early Seventies. Old ladies in the studio audience would be doubled up laughing as Mr Kerr leapt over chairs, simultaneously quaffing a glass of wine without spilling a drop. He’d gallop back to his kitchen area and fold in the béchamel sauce for the moussaka he was making. Then suddenly he’d dash off with a spoonful of seasoned minced lamb to another part of the studio and stuff it down the throat of some poor unsuspecting old dear. People weren’t watching it because they wanted to learn how to cook, they were watching because the man was funny and having a good time—surely what entertainment and cooking are all about?
Well, of course, the inevitable happened. I think Floyd was saving us to last. After pouring himself a generous glass of our red wine, he started to tell us how much he disliked people who worked in television. As far as he was concerned they were all liars and cheats. ‘They come into my restaurant pissed out of their heads, promising me the earth with my very own series. I break open my very best brandy, then they piss off and I never see them again.’
I couldn’t help but notice he had eyes that one minute twinkled with merriment, and the next looked like they were on fire as if he was about to burst into tears, rather like a small boy who’s had his fishing rod confiscated.
I told him I thought he was a very funny man who cooked well. I’m not sure whether he appreciated the word ‘funny’, but he went on to explain, in his sixty-a-day voice, how he had prepared the clams we’d had earlier. He talked passionately about his long love affair with Provence: the red wine, the olive oil, the fields of sunflowers and lavender, the soft golden light and the colour of the buildings, the spicy sausages and the salt cod with aioli. To him it was heaven and he yearned to get back there.
I think it was his voice that convinced me that he had something special about him. There was definitely a hint of danger about the man too. He reminded me of Richard Burton with a touch of Peter O’Toole. I wasn’t quite sure whether he wanted to punch me in the face or pour me another glass of wine (sadly we’d run out). I said I’d really like him to make an appearance on RPM. My idea was for him to cook a main course for a dinner party for less than a pound a head. He told me to bugger off.
Undeterred, the next morning I drew up a little contract which included a small payment for him to appear on the programme and drove round to his restaurant. He opened the sash window upstairs, cigarette in hand, and I think he must have thought I was an over-enthusiastic customer, as he looked completely bemused. I reminded him of our conversation the night before and said I’d be round the following day with a camera crew to film him creating a culinary masterpiece on a shoestring.
When we arrived the next day there, on a crowded kitchen table, were four rabbits the size of whippets, bottles of Pouilly-Fumé, cognac, saffron, bunches of fresh purple garlic, large chunks of Bayonne ham, and a wicker basket full of apricot-coloured mushrooms. There must have been over a hundred pounds’ worth of food in all, enough to feed at least twenty people, and I was paying for it.
So what happened to my wonderful idea of creating a meal for less than a pound a head? The short answer, as put by a slightly irritable Mr Floyd, was ‘bollocks to that’. He told me he saw the filming as a God sent opportunity to show off his formidable culinary skills and to create a flavour of his beloved Provence. He thought my suggestion of cooking a dinner party menu 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 (#ulink_d35e9049-a510-5e1e-b2cd-5c48344ae18b)
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 was depressing. The city centre, apart from a couple of large department stores, was a 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? (#ulink_f45f2ba5-3a47-5782-8b2d-dcb8ddef467e)
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 and I drove through the high hedgerows of Devon to the restaurant. Bluebells, red campions 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.
Old dogs can learn new tricks (#ulink_aea95b43-b72a-51c0-8865-847fcca1317c)
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 dorsal fin.
‘And now my little gastronauts,’ said Floyd to the camera—and I may not have this word perfect, but it went something like this—‘I want to tell you about this chap here. He’s called a weaver and over in France they serve him in bouillabaisse. He’s got a wonderful sweet flavour and a firm texture but over here he’s regarded as a nuisance because people might tread on him and have to be carted off to hospital.’
He then went on to suggest that the camera show a close-up of the spines of the weaver fish. ‘Look at these pricks,’ he said (rising emphasis on the word pricks I noticed), ‘because they could do you serious harm—and there seem to be an awful lot of pricks in this fish market.’ Point taken.
That evening Floyd visited a tarot card reader. He didn’t have to go very far because she was sitting near the entrance to the restaurant where we were eating with the crew. I couldn’t hear what she was saying but I could tell that she fancied him and it looked as if the feeling was mutual. They were drinking wine and laughing, and occasionally glancing back at the table where I was sitting with the crew. Eventually the consultation ended and he returned to his seat. With a beaming grin he told us the cards could foresee a tremendous future for him. He would become a household name and all his money worries would be a thing of the past. However, before he reached the heights of his powers the relationship with the ‘joker’ (I assumed he meant me) would be too strained to continue and would cease. Bloody hell, I thought, ‘we haven’t made one programme yet and already I have a sense of doom’. It took a few years, but the tarot reader was right.
Fair stood the wind for France (#ulink_2a0ed868-5300-52be-a7a6-298605cfc0ce)
Halfway through filming our first series, Floyd on Fish, we caught the ferry to Saint-Malo. The idea was to test that old fish merchant Fred Brimmacombe’s theory that the French adore practically anything that comes from the sea whereas we, with a few exceptions, prefer cod, plaice, and haddock.
Just a hundred miles south of Plymouth there’s a whole different attitude to the fishy delights that come from this piece of sea separating our two countries. The thing that interested me was why that should be. Was it history or circumstance, maybe due to hardship or war?
When I first set eyes on the town from the deck of the ferry I thought how beautiful it looked, like a huge Walt Disney castle with mighty walls and towers and turrets rising from the sea. Conversely, I thought of the first thing that would greet passengers when they sail from France to Plymouth—a large, smouldering scrap metal yard right next to the docks. I felt sure, after seeing this delightful town from the ship, we’d find people eating small hillocks of shellfish on every street corner and I wasn’t wrong.
We were here for three days, enough time to film the fish market in the morning, maybe a restaurant at lunchtime and possibly the famous oyster beds in the afternoon. After leaving our kit at the hotel it was time to get our bearings and begin to explore the town. It was late afternoon now and beginning to get cold. The all important fish market was empty at this hour, the stone counters washed down ready for business the next morning. We walked through the narrow ancient streets with their high walls. It was like a film set in which you might turn a corner and glimpse a weary knight returning from the Crusades, leading his trusty steed in search of lodgings for the night. Just six hours on a ferry and we had arrived in a different world.
After a couple of drinks we thought we’d find somewhere in which to eat all sorts of fish for the entire evening. Floyd announced, ‘I’ll find a really good restaurant but you’ve got to trust me. I don’t want to read any guides, I’ll just do it by sight, smell, and gut instinct.’
He examined the menu of the first restaurant, built into the town wall by the main entrance. We waited patiently while he had a peep inside, before declaring it far too expensive, but perfect for Americans who didn’t know any better. We continued, like a band of hunters, with Keith as our German pointer flushing out pheasants. He’d pop into a hotel and come out a few seconds later only to give it the thumbs down. There were six of us, including Clive the cameraman, Timmy on sound, Andy, the assistant cameraman, who also helped with the lights, and Frances Wallis, my trusty Scottish assistant and mother to us all—and we were all ravenous. I was dreaming of half a dozen oysters, followed by fish soup and maybe a large grilled Dover sole and a bottle of fresh, clean-tasting Muscadet, but still we traipsed on. Fortunately Saint-Malo is a compact town.
Finally, Keith stopped outside a small place with steamed-up windows called Au Gai Bec (At the Happy Mouth).
‘This is what I was looking for,’ he said. A warm glow, the sound of good conversation and clinking plates were coming from inside. ‘You can keep your Michelin stars. Steamed-up windows: the first sign of a busy, happy restaurant.’
We went in and the warmth and smells of buttery fish soup, garlic, and a hint of Gauloise hit us straight away. Curiously it wasn’t dissimilar to Keith’s Bistro back in Bristol. It was packed, but the owner, who wore Buddy Holly glasses, asked us to wait and have a drink at the small bar. From where we were standing you could glimpse the kitchen where a young woman and an older lady—her mother perhaps—toiled over an antiquated stove. It was perfect.
That evening was one of the happiest we ever spent as a film crew on the road. The food was quite wonderful. We shared a large platter of fruits de mer, like a glossary of seafood from the continental shelf: oysters and shrimps, clams of every size, winkles and whelks and raw cockles. Next we had a freshly made cotriade, a Breton fish stew made with that day’s catch, which included meaty chunks of conger eel, mackerel, and sardines. We were the last customers in the place, a perfect opportunity to get to know the owner, Jacques Yves. We didn’t need to tell him how much we enjoyed the food, but we did anyway. Over a fine pear tart and sorbets made with Calvados we told him of our mission to understand France’s love affair with fish. He assured us that we’d come to the right place and promised to help us in any way he could. In true Field Marshal Montgomery fashion we declared that from that moment on the Happy Mouth would be our brigade headquarters—and it was, for a number of years to come.
The next day involved a very early start and already, in that lovely restaurant where we were so happy, it had gone past midnight. Jacques Yves said that to wind down he usually had a nightcap on his way home, in a little bar not far away from here.
‘No, no,’ I protested. ‘It’s important we all get a good night’s sleep because we have to film in the fish market at first light and that is the sole (no pun intended) reason we came here in the first place. So let’s have no more talk of nightcaps. It’s bedtime now and that includes everybody.’
Approximately two hours later Keith and I tottered back along the cobbled streets to our hotel, feeling extremely happy with ourselves. Of course, Clive, Timmy, Andy, and Frances had sensibly gone to bed as soon as the meal was over and Keith and I had only popped in out of politeness really, but Jacques Yves was quite right, it was a lovely little bar, and once the locals found we were from the BBC they wouldn’t let us buy a drink.
The next morning I had a hangover of humungous proportions and worse, far worse, I’d slept through my alarm call. Even the hotel manager hadn’t been able to wake me. And so the others all went off to film at the market while I slept on. It was an unforgivable act and I was deeply ashamed. In times of war I’d have been tied to a cannon wheel and shot—deservedly so. However, as luck would have it, there weren’t too many locals out buying fish that early in the morning. Apparently, the market wouldn’t start to get busy until ten o’clock when the sun had crept over the high walls of the town, flooding the streets with golden light. So Keith and the crew had returned to the hotel for café au lait served in huge ceramic bowls and warm, fresh croissants with apricot jam. Thank you God.
When we returned to the market the stallholders seemed much less grumpy than their British counterparts. Maybe it was because they were so busy. There were rows and rows of tables piled high with oysters, all neatly marked in order of size. In my limited experience I knew the smaller native oysters—the flat ones with smooth shells—to be by far the best tasting. Then there were heaps of lively pink and apricot-coloured langoustines, clearly landed that morning, judging by the way they were trying to walk out of the market. The langoustine should be the culinary symbol of Brittany. Here the locals eat them simply boiled and served with mayonnaise. I made a note we had to try some before catching the ferry the next morning.
There was a large cauldron of whelks being boiled in seawater then scooped up with a huge wire ladle and unceremoniously plonked into fish boxes. I knew my hangover was fading fast when that hot shellfish aroma from the whelks, reminiscent of freshly cooked lobster, started to make me think about lunch.
Keith was on top form in the market and knew all the names of the fish on display and how best to cook them. We discovered that most of the brown crabs had come from Cornwall and Devon, and that fishing boats from Plymouth very often called in to land their catch. I’m not sure if it was strictly legal, but it made sound sense if you’d just caught a boatful of red mullet and John Dory in the middle of the English Channel. The prices would be a lot better than at home because the locals love eating fish like these. I wouldn’t mind betting it was the sort of trade that had secretly been going on since long before the Napoleonic Wars.
After an hour or so we’d filmed everything we needed and I thought it would be a good idea to visit the famous oyster beds in Cancale, a short drive away to the east. I was expecting something quaint and pretty, perhaps a few ancient thatched cottages huddled alongside a creek, where gnarled old men toiled in sailing boats dredging up oysters. So I was a bit taken aback by the sight of miles and miles of flat muddy shoreline, covered, as far as the eye could see, with black sacks. On closer inspection the sacks were made out of plastic mesh and were full of baby oysters the size of thumbnails. The mesh ensured that the sea would give them the precious nutrients they needed to grow, and the sack gave them protection from seabirds and stopped them from being swept away. The tiny oysters looked like so many pieces of chipped stone, but such was their reputation that in four years or so they could be gracing the tables of the Ritz and the Savoy.
It was a scene reminiscent of an L. S. Lowry painting, dotted with matchstick figures, some of them with rakes, some driving tractors, and others bent double, sewing up sacks. There were little paths made of concrete that wove their way along the beach and down to the shoreline. In the distance we spotted a line of schoolchildren following their teacher. At first we thought, ‘What on earth are children doing in the middle of this muddy beach on a school day?’ And then we realized this was why the French are so appreciative about food; they learn about it from an early age. We traipsed along the beach with the camera equipment and sure enough the teacher told us that this group of eight-year-olds would, as part of their education, visit farms, cheese-makers, and other local producers to learn about food, where it comes from and how it is grown and reared. I thought of the children at home who thought that milk came out of bottles and fish really did have fingers.
Over here, Clive (#ulink_861a9e10-7cc9-5287-bba2-ff9724278bb8)
On our return from France something happened in Bridport that changed things for ever. It was here that Floyd found the person he really wanted to be on television; the persona that the technicians at Plymouth had pronounced crap, and that John Purdie had predicted was destined for stardom.
During the morning we’d been filming the scallop boats returning to the narrow harbour at West Bay. Nowadays this part of the Dorset coast is famous for its hand-dived scallops. Divers wearing aqualungs scour the seabed looking for scallops of the right size. It’s a great way to preserve the stock; as with line-caught fish you take what you need and leave the rest for another day. All those years ago this method of fishing was just starting in Lyme Bay, but most of the local scallop fishermen still used small trawlers to dredge for them. Someone said it was a bit like using a tractor to weed an ornamental flowerbed. The trawler scooped up everything that came before it and its heavy chains could sometimes break the shells of the scallops. It was a couple of hours or so before each dredge was brought to the surface, which meant the shellfish, along with the rocks and mud and all the rubbish from the seabed, were tossed around as if they were in some infernal washing machine.
That afternoon we had planned to film Keith cooking king scallops in a pub, The George, in the centre of Bridport, which was very popular because they served really good coffee, freshly squeezed orange juice, and fabulous steak and chips. The problem was they were so busy we couldn’t get into the kitchen because the staff were still bustling around preparing lunches. We would have to wait, so maybe it would be a good idea to have a pint or a glass of wine or two.
Julie, Keith’s wife, had joined us, keen to see how her husband was coping in his new role as a television chef. She looked perturbed when another bottle of wine turned up, but when it came time to film, Keith seemed on sparkling form, having had just the right amount of alcohol to soothe his nerves and sharpen his wits—a delicate balancing act. He began by opening the scallops and cleaning them and went on to sauté them in butter with wine, garlic and parsley.
Then, in a seminal moment he said to the cameraman, ‘Why are you looking at me when you should be looking in the pot?’ Like an obedient dog the camera went jerkily over to the pan where the scallops were frying gently. ‘Look,’ he commanded. ‘Back over to me, if you please.’ The camera creakily returned to its original shot and Floyd announced, ‘I’m not a cameraman, I’m not a director. I know nothing about making television programmes, because I’m a cook. What I do know, however, is the star of the show isn’t me. It’s the food. So go back on to the pot and don’t come up again until I tell you to!’
Julie was looking anxious. As soon as we’d finished filming she came over to me. ‘David,’ she asked. ‘Please don’t leave that bit about the camera in. It makes him look so drunk and arrogant.’
But for me Keith’s outburst was a turning point that set a style for the programme for years to come. It was funny, engaging, and different, like one of those moments in a play when the actor tells the audience what they really think of the other characters. My favourite film for years and years was Tom Jones, with Albert Finney in the title role. I loved the way he’d turn to the camera and share a few thoughts with the cinema audience before the action moved on. Keith telling Clive, the cameraman, exactly what to point at made the scene so much more personal and immediate, and it turned Clive into a household name. ‘Over here, Clive. Come up to me, Clive. Over there, Clive…’ became a hallmark of the show. What Floyd had done, in fact, was make the audience become more involved, because he wasn’t just directing the camera, he was directing the viewer’s eye on to what was important. It was something new, something that you could never have orchestrated. It was just Floyd’s inimitable style. And actually, it was very useful, too, since in those early days I still hadn’t quite worked out how to cover the entire cooking process with just one camera. It all chimed perfectly with the foremost maxim in the world, which is: ‘The simple things are the best.’
PART II (#ulink_d794a430-9621-5f29-9b57-01ceb674faa9)
Just for starters (#ulink_a9325b3f-6aed-5f11-b8da-e7a31244ea58)
Food plays such a huge part of my life; it dominates my work and, at the risk of sounding tedious, quite a bit of my conversation. In fact, I don’t think I’ve got any friends who aren’t interested in food. They say that the average male thinks about sex every four minutes, well I reckon I think about food—and occasionally sex—every four minutes. I’ll drift off and think about pies, the kind of rabbit pies with mustard that my mother used to make shortly after the war. In the Seventies, when television executives started to discuss the possibilities of breakfast television, I thought at first it was going to be a series about people cooking breakfasts around the world. I was quite disappointed when it turned out to be a daily news magazine.
But back then my knowledge of food was limited. I hadn’t lived in a little town in Provence and, unlike Keith, I had learnt about things like salamis, olives, bread, and wine from choosing and trying stuff from the aisles and counters of the new Carrefour supermarket which had opened up in Bristol. Because I enjoyed cooking so much my friends thought me quite sophisticated, but until then I had never smelt a truffle, let alone eaten one. Caviar was a complete mystery to me and I thought sweetbreads were bull’s testicles.
One of the things we shared from our childhood, though, was a love of catching fish, mainly trout, and cooking it in the fresh air: Keith, as a young boy, growing up in Somerset, fishing on a reservoir near Wiveliscombe, and me, with my friends, Bob Lipscombe and his brother Michael, fishing on parts of the River Itchen that flowed from beyond Winchester to Southampton. Subconsciously, I think this was why we filmed so many cooking sequences outside. It was never really discussed; it just happened.
I think the Itchen is the most beautiful river in the country with its gin-clear water and waving beds of weed, the perfect environment for the handsome speckled brown trout which would lie almost motionless, save for the movement of their tails keeping them in position against the swift current. On weekends and summer evenings the three of us boys would spend our time playing on the banks and fishing. We had to pluck up courage because we weren’t supposed to be there. The river was strictly off limits and could only be fished by very rich people who paid to use large stretches of it in the summer. Technically we were poachers, albeit small time, but nevertheless we were breaking the law of the land. We local lads thought it our natural right to catch the odd trout from the river that flowed past our homes, even if the landowners and their water bailiffs didn’t see it that way.
One of the most feared water bailiffs was called Arthur. He had a large white Alsatian dog and was thought to carry a shotgun in which the cartridges were loaded with salt crystals instead of lead shot. The word was that they stung mightily. Arthur was the keeper of the salmon pool—this was where the freshwater of the River Itchen met the salty water of the Solent and it smelt of seaweed. Sometimes, through chain-link fencing, we’d watch the people who had paid for the privilege of fishing this magical spot as if they were an exotic species in a zoo. We could see that some of them weren’t particularly fussed about fishing and would prefer to sit and chat over sandwiches or a cigarette. What a waste of precious time.
Sometimes the silvery salmon would jump clear out of the water and, as if in slow motion, they would almost come to a stop before they fell back into the dark waters. We would watch like cats gazing at birds through a window, shivering with excitement. When the temptation proved too much the three of us would go out in the early morning to fish the water meadows that ran for miles along the banks of the Itchen. They were crisscrossed by small streams and sometimes little bridges made out of red brick overgrown with grass. Other times the water would be forced through a series of sluices before it rushed into a deep pool fringed with yellow and purple irises and kingcups.
In this flat landscape we could see for a mile in any direction. Any figure we spotted on the horizon made our hearts beat faster. A dog, especially a black Labrador or an Alsatian, might mean a bailiff was close by and it was time to run, though, fortunately, this stretch of water was off limits for Arthur and his fearsome white dog.
By baiting a small bronze hook with a worm and gently trotting it downstream underneath the overhanging blackthorn bushes, we could catch brown trout. They weren’t very big, about half a pound, but they were strong fighters and it was a pleasure to land them.
Once we’d caught two or three we’d to go back to the den we’d made from old bits of corrugated iron and tarpaulin. It was in a wood close to where we lived, next to a muddy, scruffy tidal tributary of the Itchen, where people used to dump their old prams. We’d thread sharpened twigs through each trout from head to tail and grill them over a camp fire, turning them so the skin cooked evenly.
To eat with them we’d make a thing called a twist. We would mix up some flour and water and knead it to make a dough. Then we’d twist it round a stick—hence the name—and put it over the fire where it would bubble and blister and eventually go smoky black. We’d cut it up with our sheath knives, sprinkle the pieces with salt, add a knob of butter and wow! If my mother had served up hot black dough and undercooked fish at home I’d have seriously considered running away, but out there in our beloved camp with our eyes stinging and streaming from the smoke, they tasted wonderful. Such are the pleasures of eating outdoors.
I think my fixation with food began in the days of rationing shortly after the war. Rationing continued for nearly ten years after the war had ended; in effect, the first ten years of my life. There wasn’t much food about, apart from parsnips, tripe, rissoles, rabbits for those quite wonderful pies, herrings and pilchards. I had no idea what rationing was, of course; the only thing I knew was that food was to be eaten and not necessarily enjoyed—although for the most part I did enjoy it—and that the little buff-coloured ration book was the source of my mother’s culinary woes. I suppose this was the period of the line ‘You’re not going to get down from the table until you’ve eaten every last thing on your plate.’
There were exceptions to this rather dull food. Sometimes my mother would be given a couple of pounds of pork chipolatas by the local butcher. (She played in the local whist drive with his wife.) Other times we would catch the bus and visit one my mother’s friends who lived in the country. This was an altogether better world where we’d be given boiled ham with parsley sauce and fresh broad beans from their amply stocked garden. The people who lived in the countryside were a lot better off than those in the towns and cities. They would feed their hens with boiled peelings from the vegetables, mixed with bran, and the malty smell was overwhelmingly delicious, just like the smell from a brewery. I couldn’t resist trying the mixture. It would have been better with a little butter and a dusting of white pepper, but it was better than tripe and better than liver. Lucky hens.
These were the days of tripe and offal, sticky spoonfuls of malt, concentrated orange juice that came in medicine bottles with corks, tins of condensed milk (a luxury), and cod liver oil; but from time to time something rare and beautiful would appear in the middle of the dining table: steak and kidney pudding, in a big white bowl covered with a tea towel, tied with string. It was a memory I’d play over and over just before going to sleep: the sight of a large spoon disappearing into that pale golden suet pastry and then coming up with a steaming mound of steak and kidney in rich velvety gravy. It was the stuff of my dreams.
My earliest memory of food was when I was learning to read. It was an illustrated fairy tale about a village that grew a giant turnip. It grew and grew until it overshadowed the cottages. In the end the blacksmith made a huge cauldron and the whole village feasted on a delicious turnip soup for days to come. The illustrations looked so lovely, with bits of the purple and yellow turnip, with its green leaves, simmering away while the villagers sprinkled it with pepper and gazed longingly at it and drooled. Even reading books like Treasure Island stimulated my appetite when, in the opening chapter, Billy Bones, a drunken pirate captain, stops at an inn and asks for a plate of bacon and eggs. Apparently that’s all he wanted to eat, a plate of bacon and eggs, and a bottle of rum. Forget the rum, I used to spend some time conjuring up what a plate of bacon and eggs would look like. I don’t think four ounces of rashers, the permissible weekly amount then, would have covered the plate.
Even singing Christmas carols in the church choir made me feel hungry. ‘Bring me flesh and bring me wine,’ said the carol ‘Good King Wenceslas’, and I’d imagine hunks of meat roasting on a spit in a huge fireplace with flagons of red wine nearby—an image no doubt equally inspired by a film I’d never tire of seeing at the Savoy cinema in Swaythling on Saturday afternoons: Robin Hood
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