‘I had to slow down. Something was going to break’
The traumatic death that made him quit Saturday Kitchen. His own life-changing health scare. And why TV’s dishiest chef thinks he’s the ingredient missing from Top Gear. James Martin cooks up a storm...
The first time James Martin tried to get into America he was seized by immigration officials, held at gunpoint and handcuffed by his wrists and ankles. ‘It was surreal and terrifying,’ says the chef, television star and car lover when we meet to talk about a new prime-time series called James Martin’s American Adventure. This time he’s driving or riding coast to coast in stunning vehicles like a vintage Pontiac or a Harley-Davidson, stopping off to cook the best food he can find – but it must have taken some nerve to go back after that heart-stopping introduction to the Land of the Free.
‘When I first started doing television, I treated my mum to a shopping trip to New York, because she had always wanted to go,’ says Martin, who is very close to his mother, Sue, and still calls her every day. ‘I let her go through first but as I handed over my passport these two guys came up on either side, walked me through to a room and one of them asked for more details about who I was. I went to get it out of my pocket and they pulled their guns out on me.’ He mimes the sight of an immigration officer pointing a pistol in his face. ‘I’m thinking, “Whoa! This is pretty serious!”’
They handcuffed his ankles and wrists to the leg of a bench and interrogated him for a long time, whipping out the guns again when Mum called to see where he was and his phone went off. ‘I said, “I’m a chef, you can look me up on the internet.” They said, “We know who you are.”’
But they were wrong. By strange coincidence, an escaped convict had used a cloned passport with Martin’s number on it to get out of America. ‘So they suddenly realise this is the wrong person. Rather than apologise, they go: “Bags are over there.” And my bag was ripped up. They’d cut it all open, stuff was everywhere. And all my mum knows is that she’s seen her son dragged off, she’s on the other side of the gate, wondering what the bloody hell is going on.’
This is just one of the hair-raising tales the chef has to tell today, because guns and scary moments feature surprisingly heavily in his new American Adventure too.
I also want to ask about Top Gear, because Martin is many people’s favourite to take over the BBC show when Matt LeBlanc quits as the main host next year. ‘Mate, I have no idea. I’ve yet to have a phone call. Trust me. I went past Paddy Power the other day and I’m six to one on. I’ve got to put a bet on myself, to be honest. In fact, I may have even put £100 on myself. But I’ve got no idea about whether I’ll get it.’
He clearly wants it. ‘Top Gear is an iconic show and I’m a car fanatic. I’ve got several more strings to my bow than I had two years ago when it was last talked about. I’ve got a bit more time. I sail. I’ve upgraded my pilot’s licence. I enjoy life more than I ever have before. Who knows what’s gonna come out of it? If it happens, it happens. I’m 46-years-old. I don’t need to send out CVs and go chasing stuff any more. I’m more than happy doing what I do.’
Martin has actually made big changes in his life after a serious health crisis two years ago, as he reveals today. He has a reputation for being spiky and private, but the trip to the States must have loosened his tongue because he starts to describe the frightening events that led to him rethinking life in 2016 and leaving Saturday Kitchen, the hugely popular show he had presented on the BBC for a decade.
‘You get to an age in your life where friends of yours are dying. I lost three or four mates to heart attacks and cancer. You go, Whoa! You spend your entire life at work, work, work, with no time for yourself and the people around you. So I made a decision two years ago to look at the way I lived my life.’
I’ve heard a rumour that his life changes were partly prompted by a friend dropping dead in front of him – is that true? Martin winces. ‘I was in Dubai for a food festival about six months before I left Saturday Kitchen. There were 2,000 people in the room. I sat talking to this wonderful guy, same age as me, same kind of story about starting from nothing, only he’d gone to Dubai and set up one of the biggest publishing houses in the Emirates. He stood up to introduce the show, but while he was on stage, that was it. I saw him black out, hit the deck. Heart attack. He’d gone before he hit the floor.’
An ambulance came but it was too late. ‘I’d spent two hours with him. I remember walking out and saying, “What’s it all for?” Just like that, you’re gone. It happens to a lot of people. Look at Anthony Bourdain. The respect you have for someone like that.’ The American chef and food writer killed himself last month. ‘Or you hear these stories about three-star Michelin chefs who are on the verge of possibly going down to two stars who go out in the garden and blow their bloody head off. You think, what? This industry’s gone mad.’ So Martin started to make a few changes – but then his own health crisis hit and it all became very serious indeed.
‘When I left Saturday Kitchen I didn’t have anything planned, I just knew I had to slow down. I had to do something or something was going to break. And then, before I could slow down, I was in hospital and I was having operations.’
He won’t say what for, but Martin gives the impression his life was in danger. ‘I wasn’t very well when I left Saturday Kitchen. I had a few operations. And I wasn’t too good. Coming out of that, you’re better but you just think, “God, you’ve got one shot at life here.”’
Martin still works hard. He hosts a Satur-
SEIZED BY IMMIGRATION, HELD AT GUNPOINT AND HANDCUFFED BY HIS ANKLES AND WRISTS
day morning magazine programme once more, James Martin’s Saturday Morning on ITV, and is shortly to go on tour with a live show, On The Road Again, touring throughout October. He boasts about getting up before anyone else tomorrow, to go and cook in his restaurant The Kitchen in Chewton Glen, before doing the same the next day at James Martin Manchester.
Some say he spreads himself too thin by endorsing food for Thomas Cook Holidays, Virgin Trains and at Glasgow Airport, where fellow television presenter Ewen Cameron tweeted a complaint last year about a ‘truly awful’ £9.50 burger served in Martin’s name. The chef apologised online, sent a team to investigate and said: ‘I’m doing my best, I’ve offered a refund… I really give a s*** about my job.’
So the pressure is still on him, all the time. But now he blocks out more time to spend in the vast garden of his mansion in Hampshire or with his mum, Sue, his sister, Charlotte, and his partner Louise Davies, who works in television as a PA. They’ve been together for six years, after meeting on the set of a celebrity edition of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?
Martin has famously lost weight in recent years, but he’s just been on a road trip to the States, home of huge portions. The blue shirt he’s matched with white jeans today is a little tight. So how’s the weight loss going?
‘It’s not really,’ he admits. ‘I’ve lost a stone and a half but that loss has gradually started to disappear a bit. I’m getting older. I’ve now got glasses. Things are dropping off and things are not working right.
‘You get older, you start waking up in the night, your bloody knee starts hurting and it accumulates. Then you think, “Actually, I probably need to take a little bit of time for chilling out.” This is a new, relaxed Martin. He knew exactly what he wanted as a child, when his parents worked on the farm and in the kitchen at the Castle Howard estate in North Yorkshire. ‘We’ve got old footage of me when I was a kid, going around the dining-room table on my skateboard. My dad said, “What do you want to do when you grow up?” I said I want my own restaurant, then I want a Ferrari when I’m 30.’
He left as a teenager to train at Michelinstarred restaurants in France and London. Aged 22, he opened his own place, the Bistro at the Hotel Du Vin in Winchester. ‘I was living in a £30-a-week flat above a Chinese with an Indian next door.’
Martin’s mother told him to buy a flat
but he said no, he wanted the car first. And he found a black Ferrari 360. ‘I phoned Mum up and I said, “I’m in the garage now.” She went, “How much is it? You could buy yourself a bloody flat for that, you bloody stupid idiot!” She put the phone down on me.’
That sent him into a bit of a spin, because her support meant so much to him. ‘So I’m in the garage going, “What do I do?” It wasn’t a materialistic thing, this car represented everything. Anyway, she phoned me back within two or three minutes and she said, “You’ve worked so hard. All you’ve ever done all your life since you were eight-years-old has been working up to this. Buy it.”’
So did he? ‘Yes, but I had to sell it within six months. I didn’t realise you had to pay that much tax on it. But before then I drove it to my mum’s house in Yorkshire and took her for a spin.’
What did she say? He goes quiet and his eyes mist, unexpectedly. ‘She hadn’t said anything at all until the other month, she came down to see me. It’s really weird.’ He’s having trouble saying this out loud. ‘She turned around to me and said, “The boy’s done good.” That’s the first time ever she’s said I’ve done all right.’ This clearly means a great deal to him, because he flicks away a tear. ‘She worries, you know? She worries about everything, and I look after her.’
He’s been able to do that since a producer happened to come to the hotel with Loyd Grossman and spotted Martin’s potential, just at the moment in the Nineties that chefs were becoming the new rock stars. After Ready Steady Cook and The Big Breakfast, Martin brought a bit of edge to Saturday Kitchen, doubled the audience and stayed for ten years.
He got that job on the back of an appearance on Strictly Come Dancing in 2005, when he finished fourth with his partner Camilia. They were also lovers for a while, as he had just finished a four-year relationship with James Bond producer Barbara Broccoli.
‘She wasn’t just in the megaleague, she was at the very top of it,’ he said of Broccoli later. The couple met at a charity auction when she paid £18,000 for Martin to cook for her friends at home in Chelsea. She lavished him with gifts including artworks by Picasso, but the proud Yorkshireman became increasingly uncomfortable with feeling like a kept man. When she offered to buy him an Aston Martin DBS with the chassis number 007, he realised he couldn’t go on. ‘Deep down, I knew there was always going to be an imbalance.’ Martin wrote those words in his autobiography. In contrast, he dated car-loving Louise Davies for five years before going public about the relationship in 2017. When I ask if they are still together, he simply says, ‘Yes.’
The self-proclaimed bachelor once said he had cars while other people had kids, so how many does he have? ‘It depends who wants to know!’ I’m not the tax man, so is it a dozen? ‘Yeah, a couple of dozen.’ His collection is reported to include two Ferrari Daytonas and three F1 cars.
Lately he has been borrowing other people’s glamorous vehicles to go from Los Angeles to New York on his American Adventure, which was originally a daytime show but has now been re-cut for prime-time.
‘We’d travel to a place, go to the market with a camera and make up a dish with what we found,’ he says. ‘The first time I cook the food is the bit that you see, no rehearsal. It’s gone wrong a few times. We’ve set things on fire. But that’s real.
TV cookery can be all whitewashed walls, really clean and tidy, and life’s not like that at home.’ He clearly loves his food. And his work (he’s said to be worth more than €5.5million). And his mum.
‘It’s the best job in the world. You can go to places you’d never dream of going, meet people you’d never dream of meeting, look after your family in a way you’d never dream of doing. My mum wants a new conservatory. Next month she gets one. I never dreamt about being able to do that.’
Whether he gets Top Gear or not, everything is working out fine, says Martin.
‘All I want to do is make great programmes. I’ve achieved more than ever thought I would in my life. I don’t want for anything more than what I’ve got. And if it all ends tomorrow, I’ve had one hell of a journey.’
I HAVE ACHIEVED MORE THAN I EVER THOUGHT I WOULD IN MY LIFE
James Martin’s American Adventure’ continues on Friday at 8pm on UTV.