How television changed the way we eat
What began as a 10-minute slot in 1946 is now a global phenomenon. William Sitwell salutes the cookery show
I’m in a hot room in a converted warehouse somewhere in East London. Sitting at a table in a suit with two well-known food critics either side of me, we’re waiting for a dessert to arrive. It’s almost four o’clock in the afternoon and this is the last of some eight courses. Lights, cameras, microphone booms are trained on us. There’s a crackle on a walkie talkie and an assistant producer announces: “Food travelling!” The director calls for quiet on the set, a door opens and in comes a very sweaty, stressedlooking chef balancing plates of food on his tattooed and scarred arms.
This is MasterChef, which I’ve been filming these past days – appearing sporadically as one of the critics to taste and deliver our damning (or otherwise) verdicts. It’s a global television phenomenon with different strands and versions across the world. And it’s one of many such shows. Actually “many” puts it rather lightly. There are squillions of these things, some rather better than others. Many addictive. The Great British Bake Off grips the nation as we wait night after night to see if sponges have risen, icings set. Celebrity chefs adorn the television schedules, there are whole networks devoted to food programming. You can catch up or watch their videos on your mobile as you sit on the bus. Couch potatoes watch their favourite chefs engage in the omelette challenge on BBC’s Saturday Kitchen; other armchair chefs follow the likes of Rick Stein as he scours the globe tasting, eating and cooking. It’s now a business worth billions. We lap it up and restaurateurs rely on their celebrity status, gained through the power of television, to put bums on the seats of their restaurants.
And it all started exactly 70 years ago. Little did Philip Harben know when he had made his first appearance on a show called Cookery on BBC television in 1946 that he was sowing the seeds of a monster. Just seven months after the end of the Second World War, at 8.55pm, in a show that lasted 10 minutes, he cooked the sort of dish the country had been missing during the years of wartime deprivation: lobster vol-au-vents.
Whether there was a run on lobster in the fishmongers of Britain is not known, but the country was still in the grip of rationing, which continued for a further seven years after the war ended. But even today most people don’t actually bother to cook what they see on television. Harben, who had run a restaurant in London’s Belsize Park, had precipitated his television career with cooking shows on the radio and he continued to present ever longer programmes in the ensuing decades, by which point others had arrived on our screens for a piece of the action. There was Fanny Cradock, who appeared with her purported and bumbling husband Johnnie – a culinary Richard and Judy of the Fifties. Their show Kitchen
Magic first aired in February 1955 and it featured Fanny cooking in front of a studio audience at the BBC’s television theatre.
It later transpired that not only was her real name Phyllis Nan Sortain Pechey, but that after she finally married the man she would introduce as her husband in 1977 it appeared that she was still married to her first husband, Archibald.
Fanny dominated the world of television cookery until the end of the Sixties and her dishes became a tonic for the grey culinary scene of post-war Britain. Viewers lapped up exotic dishes which famously once included a plate of dyed-green Duchess
potatoes. Meanwhile, the United States had its own pioneering and eccentric first celebrity chef. In 1962 Julia Child made her debut on American television with an appearance on the show I’ve Been Reading. It normally featured guests chatting about the latest books. But on one February edition, Child, 6ft 2in and towering over the male presenter, not only brought her new book into the studio but also a bowl, a whisk and some eggs. She hadn’t seen the show and indeed didn’t even own a television, but having asked for a hot plate to be available, set about madly beating eggs and talking about one of her recipes in a shrill Bostonian drawl.
Backstage, the show’s producer muttered to himself: “Who is this mad woman cooking an omelette on a book-reviewing programme?”
But viewers loved it and wrote in demanding more. In due course The
French Chef was broadcast – with a set designed to cope with Child’s considerable height. She whisked, she stirred, she splattered ingredients everywhere and, in demystifying the art of French gastronomy, gained legions of fans. It was to become the longest-running show on television. She later reflected in old age: “I fell in love with the public and the public fell in love with me.”
Less eccentric but decidedly instructive was Delia Smith who, in 1973 at the age of 32, presented the first edition of Family Fare. It was, she once said, “terrifying”.
“The programme was 24 minutes, 30 seconds, and you had to do it in that time. If you made a mistake in the middle you had to start from the top.”
Delia’s gentle instruction taught generations with her seminal series
Delia Smith’s Cookery Course and matching books – enabling, in her words, “people to learn to cook in their own homes and not go out on dark evenings to cookery classes”.
But while Delia was the definitive teacher, Keith Floyd’s brand of television cooking attracted a whole new audience. You didn’t need to want to cook to watch Floyd on Fish in 1984. And if you matched him drink for drink as the show aired, you probably wouldn’t be able to anyway.
His maverick style, gently mocking his long-suffering cameraman Clive, always having a glug of wine before stirring the pot, demonstrated how a chef could become a celebrity – and many followed in his wake.
Since then we’ve had Two Fat Ladies, Nigella Bites, The Naked Chef and Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares in 2004, in which people willingly subjected themselves to verbal abuse more for the benefit of a crowing audience than any culinary instructional benefit.
And while Philip Harben is often credited as the man who got the ball rolling, there was, in fact, a man called Marcel Boulestin who, on January 21 1937, presented a 15-minute programme called Cook’s Night Out. But the onset of war put paid to the show. The dish he cooked was an omelette and, in spite of the wall-towall cookery programmes we have today – along with magazines and supplements, videos and apps – how many of us can say that we can really turn out a half decent one?
‘If you drank like he did on the show, you wouldn’t be able to cook at all’