Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
WHY WE CAN’T HAVE TOO MANY COOKS
Our insatiable craving for TV food shows – plus some rather delicious royal revelations – in our stunning second Silver Jubilee issue
Not that long ago I was standing in the MasterChef kitchen. I was at a table with presenters John Torode and Gregg Wallace watching as some poor individual made their way from the back of the room, past the cooking stations, past their fellow competitors, holding aloft a dish to be presented for tasting. The contestant approached, nervous as anything, and gingerly placed the offering on the table before taking two steps back. What a strange phenomenon. It was like watching a novice priest proffering their gift to the gods at an altar. Would thunder and lightning ensue?
Well, for one poor contestant that day, it might have felt like that. As Gregg Wallace puts it, ‘Cooking doesn’t get tougher than this.’ Amateur cooks, professionals, celebrities too, present themselves and their dishes to judges, critics like me, and the nation. Reputations can be made, lives changed, and not always for the better. Yet still they queue up to be part of it.
As I filmed recently I thought back to the origins of this show, which got into its stride 25 years ago. Back then its host was Loyd Grossman, who conjured up a catchphrase to appeal to the British TV-watching public. After three amateur cooks had presented their dishes to Grossman and a changing cast of celebrity judges – who ranged from art historian Roy Strong to chef Anton Edelmann – Loyd would address the camera and say, in his best Bostonian mid-Atlantic drawl, ‘We’ve deliberated, cogitated and digested.’
‘I knew, because of my experience in light entertainment TV, how important a catchphrase was,’ Loyd has explained to me, ‘and I knew people would start repeating it. It became a viral thing.’ That’s viral pre-YouTube, which wasn’t born until 2005, after which point anyone with a phone and enough confidence could start making their own programmes. Which some have, a few very successfully.
Today, you can’t ignore the cooks emerging on social media. This autumn, for example, Prue Leith, a judge on The Great British Bake Off and a fixture on the British food scene for nearly 60 years, has a new book (Prue: My AllTime Favourite Recipes) that’s on display in shops alongside new foodie star Ben Lebus’s tome, Mob Kitchen. Lebus doesn’t have a TV show, but a huge following on Instagram and YouTube, where his Mob Kitchen features recipes to feed four people for under £10.
Chef Rachel Khoo also came to prominence through social media before gaining her own BBC show in 2012, The Little Paris Kitchen: Cooking With Rachel Khoo.
Lebus is just one part of the food TV landscape that today is spread across TV in all its forms, from the BBC to Netflix. In addition to cornerstones like MasterChef and The Great British Bake Off, there’s travelling Geordie duo Si King and Dave Myers, AKA The Hairy Bikers, studio-based professionals’ challenge Great British Menu, real-people dinner-party contest Come Dine With Me and weekend magazine show Saturday Kitchen. There’s Gordon Ramsay shouting at people in various formats, plus his daughter Matilda, who stars in a cooking show aimed at kids on CBBC. And very much more besides.
All of these shows owe something to the producers and presenters of food TV that exploded onto British screens a quarter of a century ago. MasterChef itself was a show that saw the start of a revolution in food television. It was, says Grossman, ‘pioneering’. It ‘kickstarted the proliferation of food programmes on TV’. The show was origi-
nally devised by film director Franc Roddam, who had become famous in the 1970s with his mod-revival cult classic Quadrophenia. Roddam picked Grossman as presenter, having seen him on Through The Keyhole (which, like MasterChef, has a new life these days with a rather different presenter than its original host David Frost, in the form of Keith Lemon). Grossman had been a restaurant critic for The Sunday Times and Harpers & Queen magazine, so had the credentials.
The set of MasterChef in those days was dark and slick. The great and the good of the culinary world appeared, from Michel and Albert Roux to Pierre Koffmann, Simon Hopkinson and Alastair Little. They appeared alongside celebrities such as actor Michael Caine and musician George Melly. Grossman believes that the show was responsible for what he calls ‘a huge transformation. It opened up food culture to a mass audience.’
But there is another character who bestrode food television in the 1990s, and who many TV chefs today still credit with being their first inspiration – Keith Floyd. Before Floyd, food shows were invariably studio-based. From TV cookery’s inception – Marcel Boulestin cooking an omelette in January, 1937 for Cook’s Night Out on the BBC – to Delia Smith, Ken Hom and Madhur Jaffrey in the 1970s and beyond, the format was always safe and indoors.
Floyd changed all that. Like some boozy, reckless uncle, he swaggered into view, glass of wine in hand, saying things like, ‘You might be looking into my eyes, thinking, “God, he looks in a terrible mess.” Well, the truth is I am in a terrible mess. You can’t help it. France, wine… I’m afraid we overdid it a bit last night.’ Floyd was the discovery of TV producer and director David Pritchard, who once said, ‘It was the impromptu feel of our programmes that would help to capture the hearts of the British public. As
‘Floyd staggered into view like some boozy, reckless uncle’
well as the feeling that anything could go wrong at any time.’ Or as Floyd once put it, ‘We simply went out on the road and thought, “Let’s go and get a fish and cook it.”’
The public loved it, many of whom would have gone out of their way to avoid more formal studio-based shows. But Floyd was infectious, and inspired generations of presenters such as Antony Worrall Thompson, who says, ‘We modern TV chefs all owe him a living. He kind of spawned us all.’
Worrall Thompson was then himself part of a show – safely back in the studio – that started in 1994 and produced a new slew of cooking characters. Ready Steady Cook was originally hosted by Fern Britton, who was followed by the energetic Ainsley Harriot – and this was where a young James Martin, clad in a headband, first appeared on TV. It was a simple idea in which two chefs competed to cook a meal – with ingredients shopped by members of the public, and sometimes celebrities – that cost £5 or under. Ten years later Weekend columnist Martin finally landed his own major gig when he took over the reins of Saturday Kitchen from original host Worrall Thompson. Martin, with his relaxed Northern charm, doubled the viewing figures and was at the show’s helm for the next ten years. A permanent replacement still hasn’t been found, and the main fixture, Matt Tebbut, shares the host’s seat with a roster of presenters from Michel Roux Jr to Tom Kerridge.
But it was an even bigger figure who first emerged during the 1990s. While late producer Pat Llewellyn was making a film about upmarket Italian restaurant The River Café (owned by Ruth Rogers and Rose Gray) in 1997 she spotted a young sous-chef in the kitchen called Jamie Oliver.
Llewellyn quickly developed a format for him – The Naked Chef. But Oliver’s first attempts to speak to the camera for the pilot were disappointing. His natural persona that she’d William Sitwell with John Torode and Gregg Wallace on MasterChef this year
and (right) Nigella Lawson in 2014 spotted was replaced by an awkward shyness. Llewellyn persevered, however, and re-shot the entire thing, engaging with him instead in conversation off camera. She prompted and chatted to him throughout, drawing out his natural energy and passion. The programme debuted in 1999 and was a huge success, gaining some two million views per episode. Oliver’s journey since then is well documented, as he’s gone from cooking inspirer to campaigner with a hoard of books, TV shows and restaurants to his name. Perhaps now, as he looks back on a year of commercial crisis – he has closed his chain of Union Jack restaurants and bailed out Jamie’s Italian with his own money – he wishes he had a business mentor as good as his first TV one.
And Pat Llewellyn didn’t just see the talent in Jamie. Three years earlier she found two women – who had never met each other but shared a love of food and a dislike of diets – put them together on a motorbike and sidecar and unleashed Two Fat Ladies onto British TV. It was all good timing. While our screens were filled with vain working- class male restaurant chefs, here were two posh women – Clarissa Dickson Wright and Jennifer Paterson – gently rustling up oldfashioned dinner parties and doing it with lashings of lard and clotted cream. The series went on to gain some 70 million views worldwide.
As the new millennium dawned, another woman who would become a culinary TV legend inveigled her way into our living rooms. Nigella Lawson’s Nigella Bites came out a year after the Naked Chef, but the two couldn’t have been more different. Lawson almost enveloped the camera as she declaimed her lust for food. And the shows were highly stylised and produced. Each recipe was filmed six times for each of the cameras. While Oliver slid down the banisters and leapt out of the house to see his friends, Lawson might end the show adorned in a silk dressing gown as she crept downstairs looking for a midnight feast from her top-of-the-range fridge.
Perhaps Rick Stein’s Seafood Lovers’ Guide in 2000 came as an antidote to the slew of shows that were almost all shot on locations, or in studios, that pretended to be the presenters’ houses. It’s probably no coincidence Stein’s producer was original Floyd man David Pritchard. Indeed, Stein had first appeared on Floyd On Fish in 1985. Fifteen years later he had his own show, introducing viewers to the wonders of our beaches and the flavours of our fish.
Stein had that rare gift to extemporise in front of the camera. He was a natural. A one-take presenter who wanted nothing more than to encourage us to learn a little and increase our recipe repertoire. He was a nurturing, almost forgiving tutor out there in the wild.
So it came as no surprise when TV bigwigs decided, in 2004, that it was time to do the complete opposite. Gordon Ramsay had first come to British screens in Ramsay’s Boiling Point in 1999. This was more documentary than cooking show. The cameras followed Ramsay around as he abused his cheffing underlings.
Keen to capitalise on Ramsay’s ability to deliver ranting abuse on cue, they screened a new format called Hell’s Kitchen. This was a reality show in which two teams of celebrities competed to cook and withstand Ramsay’s invective. In the second series the contestants cooked under the mi lder guidance of Gary Rhodes and Jean- Christophe Novelli (the latter an increasingly popular guest of daytime cookery shows, loved by the ladies for his good looks, French accent and ability to spin sugar). But most professional cooks kept well clear of such shows. The French chef Raymond Blanc was particularly critical, telling me in 2006, ‘The onscreen impression of what happens inside a restaurant is a disaster for us. It strips people of dignity and promotes abuse. We have eight million watching these programmes. How are we going to encourage young people to become chefs if the image of catering promoted by television is one of violence and humiliation?’
And so it was that chefs like Tom Kerridge and Marcus Wareing came to public prominence in the milder environment of Great British Menu, in which top chefs compete against each other for a chance to host a high-profile banquet. Wareing was a winner in 2006 and Kerridge in 2010. And guess what, both now host TV shows. As does one of the stars of the judging line-up, Prue Leith, who is now a fixture on The Great British Bake Off. The baking frenzy in the UK has been fuelled and nurtured by The Great British Bake Off. And it’s made legends of its presenters and stars of its winners (Nadiya Hussain, who triumphed in 2015, being a prime example). British food TV is like a good sourdough. Week in, week out, the starter dough is fed by passionate foodies. It gives life and spawns new loaves and sometimes even the crumbs become stars in a new recipe. And it never ceases to feed, entertain and surprise us. What a delicious 25 years!
William Sitwell is editor of Waitrose & Partners Food, williamsitwell.com.
‘Nigella declaimed her lust for food’ ‘Stein was a nurturing tutor out in the wild’