Nigella rues letting TV into her kitchen
Nigella Lawson regrets filming early cooking programmes in her home, she has revealed, saying she felt ‘‘consumed by others’’ when they were broadcast.
The celebrity cook’s breakthrough series, Nigella Bites on Channel 4 in 1999, was taped in her home kitchen in west London. As her profile grew and Lawson joined the BBC, production shifted to purpose-built sets.
Series including Nigellissima, At My Table and last year’s hit Cook, Eat, Repeat were recorded in studios designed to resemble her domestic kitchen, with a smattering of personal possessions.
‘‘I find the blurring of private and public slightly difficult,’’ Lawson told The New Yorker magazine. ‘‘You could say I did bring it on myself: when I started doing TV, I shot the TV programmes in my home. At that time in my life, it never seemed to me that I was invading my own privacy by having cameras in the house. It seemed OK, because it doesn’t feel like that when you’re shooting.
‘‘Then, when it airs, and you’re the person on camera, it feels like you’re being consumed by others. It’s an alienating feeling.’’
Lawson, 61, said that she had embraced solitude and indolence during lockdown.
‘‘It must be an age thing – over the past three years, I have found I have grown not just to enjoy solitude but to need it,’’ she said. ‘‘Like many things, once you get used to it, it becomes very necessary.’’
She added: ‘‘I don’t know to what degree this is about solitude, and to what degree it’s about the pandemic, but I have found my relationship to time has changed enormously. I can be sitting on the sofa and two hours have gone by, and I don’t quite know how that’s happened.’’
Lawson now prefers that her days are not ‘‘broken up’’ by activities such as going out for lunch. ‘‘If I know I’ve got to go out in the daytime, I get very little work done in the morning because I’m thinking I have to go out, and then when I get back I feel like I can’t do anything now.’’
Eating out is no longer the joy it was, as she is recognised so regularly. ‘‘If I’m here in London, say if I went to a restaurant, excepting a very few restaurants, I don’t feel I’m in a safe private space,’’ she said. ‘‘I find it far less frightening to go on to a stage and do a Q&A.’’
Lawson, the daughter of Lord Lawson of Blaby, the former chancellor, started her career as a restaurant critic and literary journalist, breaking into television after the success of her first cookbook, How to Eat, in 1998.
She has become an enthusiastic tweeter, with 2.7 million followers. She described social media as an ‘‘authentic form of communication’’ from which she takes ‘‘genuine pleasure’’. During lockdown she would frequently wake at 4am, make a cup of tea and answer fans’ recipe questions. ‘‘I really warmed to that sense of companionship,’’ she said.