Interview Rachel Allen
Just before filming Glynn would whisper a filthy joke in my ear... next thing I’m on camera
IN January, the rumour mill went into overdrive when Rachel Allen was spotted arriving, along with a host of Michelin starred chefs, to a test shoot at a secret London location. Also on board was Great British Bake Off’s Paul Hollywood, leading everyone to speculate rather feverishly, ‘could Rachel Allen be the new Mary Berry?’
‘I had to sign a confidentiality agreement, and I didn’t even tell my mum I was doing it,’ Allen laughs. ‘I had to ring her (when the news broke) and say, “now Mum, I’m in the Mail Online, but don’t worry”. Her first words were, “oh God, what have you done?”
And in many ways, Rachel would have made a more than fitting successor to Mary Berry. In 2014, Allen doffed a cap to the baking doyenne, tweeting: ‘It’s clear the Bake Off phenomenon has been a huge influence. I love Mary to bits, Britain does too, and she should be made a Dame for her lifelong services to our industry.
‘She’s a grandmother, a role model and someone who has made home baking accessible. She is an amazing lady with a wonderful sense of humour.’ Yet when the show premiered on Channel 4 seven weeks ago, it transpired that the new-fangled lineup featured Prue Leith, Sandi Toksvig and Noel Fielding.
Naturally, everyone was curious as to how Allen – a homespun, fresh-faced domestic goddess, already a household name in Ireland – missed out on a coveted spot on one of Britain’s biggest TV shows.
For her part, Allen isn’t the least bit perturbed, and doesn’t feel as though she missed out: ‘The dynamic of it, I think, has worked,’ she surmises. ‘I definitely think the right people are in the mix and they chose the right person in Prue. And I love Noel. Mary Berry’s shoes are big ones to fill, but I think it’s a really great show.’
Turns out that the chefs that fateful January afternoon were being tested for a number of different projects. Clearly Rachel did something right, because Channel 4 bosses decided to pair her with restaurateur Glynn Purnell for the second season of the British version of My Kitchen Rules. The first season was helmed by model-turned foodie Lorraine Pascale and chef Jason Atherton, but producers evidently decided on a shake-up.
With Dubliner Colin Fassnidge at the helm, My Kitchen Rules is already a massive hit in its native Australia, and beamed into sitting rooms the world over. Its format is simple but compelling: pairs of home cooks from different regions invite contestants, and two very exacting judges, into their homes for a dinner party. They are judged on their fare, and then compete in a number of challenges to win the grand prize of £10,000.
Rachel had known Glynn casually, but the two became fast friends while shooting the show across the UK.
‘I think I was like his bossy big sister,’ notes Rachel. ‘He is hilarious though. Just before filming, he’d whisper a filthy joke in your ear and next thing you’re on camera. In any case, it worked.’
Initially, it was thought that Rachel might be the wholesome and sunny yin to his exacting yang. But it didn’t quite work out like that. As a sometime teacher in the Ballymaloe Cookery School, following in the footsteps of her motherin-law Darina Allen and grandmother-in-low Myrtle Allen, Rachel had plenty of constructive criticism of her own to hand out.
‘We chatted a little beforehand and I thought I would be the good cop and he would be the bad cop,’ Rachel recalls. ‘In the end, we kind of evened out and it was like, “who will be the kind one today?”
‘I tried to focus on the positive, and I thought I’d be looking at things from a home cook perspective but in the end, possibly because of my teaching experience, I was probably harsher or more strict in some ways. But if you’re going to do pastry, you have to do it right.’
It’s a change of tack for Rachel, who has long been at home in the more traditional cookery format. Is this a concerted push towards becoming more of a ‘personality’ outside of Ireland?
‘Not at all,’ says Rachel. ‘My shows have been on British TV for years and, I think they’re most watched in the Middle East and Asia.
‘It’s not that I want to be a celebrity or anything,’ she adds. ‘I like my life, but it was more of a question of “great, let’s just chat to Channel 4 and see what they say”. It definitely wasn’t a conscious career thing.’
Filming for My Kitchen Rules took place over three months earlier this year: at the time Rachel hopped back and forth between her native Cork and London.
‘I got to know the airports quite well,’ she smiles wryly. ‘The good thing is that I earned loads of frequent flyer points, which is brilliant.
‘The family (husband Isaac, Joshua, 17, Lucca, 15 and Scarlett, 8) came over, but mostly it was me flying home from filming. The boys, not so much as they’re pretty independent by now, but Scarlett came over a couple of times.’
Rachel O’Neill married Isaac Allen in October, 1998 in Cloyne Cathedral and became a major part of the Ballymaloe culinary dynasty. The two of them are steeped in romantic legend. Eighteen-year-old Rachel, so the story goes, was in Ballymaloe, doing the Cookery School’s famous threemonth course, when she fell for the proprietor’s son.
Rachel and Isaac’s meeting had strong echoes of how Rachel’s future mother-in-law Darina met her own husband: when Darina arrived to work in Ballymaloe, having been offered a job by Myrtle Allen, the first person she met was Tim Allen, Myrtle’s son. She ended up marrying him.
In 2002, one of Allen’s students happened to be a producer for the Irish TV station RTE, and suggested she should move into television.
‘I was pregnant, and I wasn’t thinking about anything like that at all, but I said ‘yes’ and we did a pilot and RTE liked it and that was it. It is funny how these things happen,’ she told the Belfast Telegraph last year. ‘My husband then said I should write a cookbook to go with the series and I have written a cookbook for every series since and I now have 14. I can’t believe that it was 14-and-a-half years ago when it all started.’
With almost 15 years of TV experience behind her, filming My Kitchen