SOMETIMES I HAVE TO PINCH MYSELF

Launching his new Islands To Highlands cookbook and TV series, Weekend columnist James Martin tells Lisa Sewards why his trip round the UK was an epiphany – and how a thank-you to his fans broke his internet!

James Martin is having a ‘pinch-me’ moment. His website has just crashed after he sent his social media followers into a frenzy by saying he wanted to visit someone’s house and cook for them for free as a thank-you to his fans.

Many people thought he’d been hacked. But he hadn’t, and he’s since had 2.9 million responses. ‘I’d just finished work. I poured a gin and tonic at home, looking at my cars and the space around me, playing some music and thinking, “How the hell did all this happen?”

‘I suddenly felt an urge to say to my followers, “Thank you very much for everything you’ve done. I don’t know how on earth I’m going to ever repay you, other than the fact I’m just going to cook for somebody random. I want to come to your house and cook for one of you.” I was thinking there might be six replies, but it’s just gone mental. I mean, look...’ he says, brandishing his mobile phone showing his Twitter feed going crazy.

‘I woke up this morning and my office said, “What the hell have you done?” And I said, “Oh my God, I’ve not done anything bad, have I?” And the girl who looks after my TV shows said, “You broke your website!”’

James’s loyal fanbase is testimony to his longevity in the business. He’s been cooking for nearly 40 years, having started at eight, and been a TV chef for 27. ‘Rick Stein has longevity because he believes in what I believe in,’ says James, who’s also been Weekend’s cookery columnist for the past three years. ‘Rick loves food. I love food. We never follow tradition.

‘Publishers and producers want you to follow a particular fashion – these days it’s wellbeing – but can you imagine the reaction of the millions who watch me if all of a sudden I gave up butter? No. Everything I cook, I eat. Some people say I eat too much of it. But that’s me,’ he insists.

There’s plenty to eat in his new Islands To Highlands cookbook, a collection of 80 mouthwatering dishes from around the British Isles – such as stuffed leg of Welsh lamb, Singapore crab with stottie cakes and duck egg sponge with blackberry jam – which is serialised over the next two weeks in Weekend magazine.

The book goes hand in hand with his new 20-part TV series of the same name, a delicious jaunt around Britain that sees him travelling from the Scilly Islands to the Shetlands and all points in between sampling the local produce. On the road we see James making dishes such as poached turbot with a creamy herb sauce on a boat in Guernsey and traditional Singing Hinny griddle cakes in Northumberland, as well as meeting some of the nation’s most devoted food producers.

In Lough Neagh in Northern Ireland, the largest freshwater lake in the British Isles, he was struck by the extraordinary sight of eels and pollan, a type of freshwater herring, being caught. ‘This was not a pondlike lake. This was rough and we were on this little boat pulling in the eels by hand on a massive 400-link hook,’ he recalls.

‘It was one of the highlights of my trip. These eels taste delicious and yet they’re all exported to Holland. So I made fishcakes and I used smoked eel to make a butter sauce with it for a recipe called

‘It was like having new eyes at the age of 47’

Lough Neagh eels, two ways, with bacon and butter sauce.’

He was enchanted by Mrs Mack’s Farm Shop, a tiny outlet in a shipping container in the back garden of a family farm in Torrin on the Isle of Skye, which he chanced upon when driving around looking for a snack. ‘Mrs Mack bought the shipping container for £50. Her mum makes these incredible cakes and you sit there on the two seats outside, overlooking the entire Isle of Skye,’ he says.

One of James’s recipes, steak with mushrooms three ways, was inspired by the quality of mushrooms farmed all over the UK. ‘Forest Fungi in Devon is incredible as the mushrooms seem to be growing in what looks like a bungalow that’s been kitted out into a hightech mushroom farm. What they’re producing there is amazing.’

This is the fourth instalment in James’s Adventures television series, the first being the French Adventure in 2017, followed by his American Adventure and last year’s Great British Adventure. The series have not only been a step into the unknown for him, but they’ve also opened his eyes to a whole slice of life he was missing out on.

‘I’d never been to 90 per cent of the places we filmed,’ he admits. ‘On day one of this new series we went to the Isles of Scilly. It’s 20 miles off the south coast and the beaches look like the Caribbean. It’s just so beautiful I cannot tell you, and I swam with 500 seals. It was incredible.

‘Then on the last day of filming we were in the Shetland Islands where I was trying to explain on camera how extraordinary the daylight was. I said it’s like having new eyes at the age of 47. It was like I’d been in a cocoon, and these TV shows let me see and smell the most incredible things for the first time.’

James had become a household name presenting the BBC’S Saturday Kitchen for ten years after cutting his teeth on Ready Steady Cook and The Big Breakfast. He brought a touch of rock god to the show, and the ratings doubled to 3.5 million. He landed the job on the back of his appearance on Strictly Come Dancing in 2005, when he finished fourth with his partner Camilla Dallerup. She became his girlfriend for a while, as he had just ended a four-and-a-halfyear relationship with James Bond producer Barbara Broccoli.

Back then he was a pin-up chef, posing on kitchen tables and looking fabulously seductive with his long, dark locks and sultry smile. ‘It’s a bit different now,’ he chuckles, although he’s still looking good at the age of 47. ‘If I hadn’t done Strictly I wouldn’t have got Saturday Kitchen, without a shadow of a

doubt. And I loved filming it every Friday and Saturday until I thought, “I don’t want to just be a TV chef.”

‘I first put a chef’s jacket on when I was eight [helping his father, who ran the catering at Castle Howard in Yorkshire] and I’d lost touch with that. But ever since I left Saturday Kitchen I’ve worked in restaurants – now I have my James Martin Manchester restaurant. I was there for five days last week and not a single one of the people eating in that room knew I was even in there.’ He also has a restaurant, The Kitchen, at Chewton Glen spa hotel in Hampshire.

‘When I left Saturday Kitchen in 2016 I didn’t have anything planned, but the reaction was massive. I couldn’t have predicted that but two people did. My mum was one, she said, “People will follow you. You don’t realise how many people watch your show.” Chris Evans said that too. I didn’t realise until that point. So there are these little “pinch-me” moments. This social media frenzy is another one.’

Six months before he left Saturday Kitchen he realised that he had to slow down when a good friend had a heart attack and died right in front of him at a Dubai food awards show. ‘He stood up on stage to introduce the event. I didn’t know he was about to present me with an award, but everybody else did. I was just with him because I wanted to be there and he was super excited.

‘I was literally sat next to him chatting, and he got up on stage and within ten minutes he was dead. There were people screaming, but I knew he was dead before he’d even hit the floor,’ recalls James. ‘You think, “Life’s too short”, it can be taken away from you just like that. So I began to wonder whether I was doing Saturday Kitchen because I enjoyed it or just to make a TV programme. I don’t have aspirations to have 80 restaurants, I just wanted to cook. So I called Carla-maria Lawson, who’s now BBC Head of Daytime, and she said, “This is the dreaded phone call, isn’t it?”’

James then faced his own health crisis, which he has described as ‘turbulent carnage’ but has always refused to go into further detail about. ‘I’ve always kept quiet about personal matters, but you don’t get any younger and your body thinks it can do what it used to do when you were 20 years old,’ he says.

‘My mum’s had her health issues as well, and that’s one of the benefits of doing this job because I can afford to look after her. But my friend’s death was all part of the wake-up call. I suddenly thought, “S***! We’re the same age, same scenario, same thing.” Yes I have medicals and I rarely drink and I don’t smoke, but it was still a shock.’

James is in rude health today and although he’s famously lost weight in recent years, he admits to carrying a bit more than is ideal. ‘I’m always going to be big as I’m 6ft 3in and 17st. On Strictly I was a big lad and doing the jive was tough, so Camilla said to me, “You need to lose a bit of weight. I’m not telling you to eat any different, but this is going to take it out of you.” I lost 5st by working my socks off, dancing ten hours a day.’

Despite his wake-up call, he’s still working his socks off. He now hosts Saturday Morning With James Martin – ITV’S flagship cookery show – but it’s filmed at his home in Hampshire, which allows him to pull on his chef’s apron in his own restaurant afterwards. ‘I don’t have to get up at 4am and do a rehearsal because we don’t do them. So the crew arrive at 8.30, we start filming at 9.30, the guests arrive at 11.30 and we’re finished by 4.30.

Continued from page 5 That means I can go to work at one of my restaurants,’ he says.

‘There are still moments where I can’t believe the guests and chefs want to come to my house and spend the day with me. Jodie Kidd set me up recently. She arrived in one set of clothes, changed for the show, and then when she got changed back again she deliberately put all her other clothes, including her underwear, in strategic places all over my private chill room, which we use as a green room during filming,’ he laughs. ‘So when the cleaner arrived the following day it was embarrassing. She said, “You need to sort this out James, because I’m not going in there.”’

Fortunately James’s partner Louise Davies, who works in television as a PA, didn’t bat an eyelid. Having been with him since 2011 after meeting him on the set of Celebrity Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, she must be used to the media rollercoaster.

James has been driven all his life. Indeed, Driven is the title of his autobiography. His parents worked both on the farm and in the kitchen at Castle Howard, and there’s old footage of James, aged five, skateboarding around the dining table saying ‘when I grow up I want to own my own restaurant, then I want a Ferrari when I’m 30’.

He’s followed his dream religiously. He trained at Michelinstarred restaurants in France and London, and by the age of 22 he’d opened the bistro at the Hotel du Vin in Winchester. And instead of sensibly buying a flat he did buy a Ferrari, much to the horror of his beloved mum Sue.

He still loves his flashy cars but he’s more laid-back these days, enjoying the pleasures of country life. As testimony to that, he has a spanielycalled superbly tra ne Cooper wor and g they walk for hours, James’s form of relaxation. They make a fine pair, even, to James’s amusement, in the alien territory of London.

‘He doesn’t walk on a lead. He’ll always walk to your left. He won’t walk past you. When I stop, he’ll stop. When I say sit before we walk on the road, he sits. I walk out to the middle then I call him over. We were in Bond Street once, and everybody was looking,’ smiles James. ‘This lady came up and said, “What is that dog?” And I said, “He’s a working dog. That’s what they do.”’

Like Cooper, James is in control these days, especially since he set up his own production company to make the cookery travel shows. Experiencing such a cornucopia of incredible food is a world away from the M&S vouchers he lived off when he first started working in the industry.

‘Mum used to send me the vouchers when I had no money. Now she’s discovered Ocado and I pay the bills each week,’ he laughs. ‘One of the joys of the job was being able to buy my mum a house three years ago and I gutted it from top to bottom.’

She must be proud of her son. James nods quietly but has an admission. ‘I live partly on a boat – it’s my big pride and joy. Four months ago I took Mum to the Isle of Wight. We just moored up and she sat in the boat with a glass of Champagne and the sun setting behind her, and she said, “You know what, you’ve done all right.” I said, “Do you realise, that’s the first time you’ve ever said that?”’

It was, no doubt, another pinch-me moment. n

James Martin’s Islands To Highlands will air weekdays from Monday 6 April at 2pm on ITV.

‘I live partly on a boat – my big pride and joy’

James plans his route, and (right) eel fishermen at Lough Neagh