Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
...AND THE DREAM TEAMS
What’s the recipe for a perfect culinary partnership? Let the stars tell you in their own words...
Sue Perkins certainly had her tongue in her cheek as she reeled off her culinary credentials. ‘I’ve been cooking since I was four,’ she told us in 2006. ‘My rock buns were tooth breakers; my mum held them in her cheek for hours. But Mum is a good cook. There was lots of meat and potatoes and we always had tinned peaches with Ideal milk. If we were good she’d make pineapple upside-down pudding. When pasta arrived in Croydon, it was exotic – mince and potatoes became lasagne. I ate my first avocado when I was 20.’
A job application to front Bake Off? Sadly not. She was talking about being a contestant on Celebrity MasterChef. It would be another four years before she and her comedy sidekick Mel Giedroyc landed their dream jobs on THE GREAT BRITISH
BAKE OFF. And what a dream team it was, with ol’ blue eyes Paul Hollywood and Mary Berry as the judges. ‘We aren’t four people you’d automatically put together, but it somehow works,’ Mel told us in 2014. ‘We call ourselves a dysfunctional family.’ She offered an eye-popping insight into life with Mary. ‘She’s the rebellious one. She’s the last one standing at the bar. And she’s been clubbing in Ibiza. She’s not a sweet old lady – she’s tough as old boots.’
In 2012, Paul revealed to us, ‘Mary reminds me of the Queen. There’s something regal about her when she hooks her arm through mine to walk down a red carpet.’ This particular team seemed destined to last – so much so that Mary once told us, ‘We’re a gang and we do things together. We think as one. If they want us to do something, we either all say no or all say yes.’ But as we now know that wasn’t to be.
One of the greatest culinary partnerships was the TWO FAT
LADIES. The late Lynda Lee-Potter went to meet them in 1997 and declared them the ‘funniest doubleact since Morecambe and Wise’. What a riot the encounter was. Jennifer Paterson let rip on, well, everyone, admitting ‘I hated my mother’ and explaining that she was once thrown out of her brother’s house for saying something he didn’t like. ‘He was living in Carshalton at the time, such a ghastly place. He’s rather mean. I never liked him and I’m not very fond of my nephews and nieces.’ Clarissa Dickson Wright opened up about the alcoholism that had left her homeless and destitute. ‘I drank alcoholically from the start,’ she recalled. ‘I began with a third of a bottle of vodka before I got out of bed to stop my hands shaking. Beer was my breakfast and I drank two bottles of gin a day.’
She admitted she reached rock bottom. ‘I wanted to die,’ she said. ‘I had nothing, not even a rented flat. I had two plastic bags full of empty gin bottles, the clothes I stood up in, a few books and my knives. The only thing that kept me from being destitute was that I could cook.’
Our journey with THE HAIRY
BIKERS has taken us to unlikely places. In 2013, when the portly pair lost six stone and turned into healthy eating gurus, they told us why. ‘We’d turned into those middle-aged men who think it’s normal to get through the day on tablets. When we look back, carrying all that weight was crippling us. We’d be staying in these amazing places but spending every night swapping stories about how exhausted we were,’ said Si King, the younger of the two. ‘We kidded ourselves it was “research”, but it was really about stuffing our faces.’
Si suffered a potentially fatal brain aneurysm the following year, and his account in our 2014 interview of almost dying was harrowing. ‘I was at home watching the rugby and everything just started to fall off the bottom of the TV,’ he recalls. ‘I thought, “I’m in trouble here.” Then I had this searing pain – like someone was going at my head with a rusty nail and a hammer. It’s an incredibly scary thing. More people die from this type of thing than survive.’
For Dave Myers it was an emotional time. ‘To see your mate lying there is terrible. When he went in he was sick as a parrot, but conscious. They were keeping everything under control till they could get him to theatre. There wasn’t much joking then.’
Another unlikely partnership was born when John Torode, then the chef on This Morning and who had been Weekend’s cookery writer, was paired with fruit-and-veg man Gregg Wallace for the revamped MASTERCHEF in 2005. As odd couples go, this pair were top of the league. In 2011, they told how seat-of-the-pants the early shows were. ‘Our first dressing room was an electricity cupboard,’ Gregg said. ‘Every few minutes someone would come in to switch on some lights. We filmed in a metal-and-glass prefab, which was like a sauna. We put cardboard boxes on the roof to keep the sun out.’
The pair had known each other for ten years before MasterChef (Gregg’s company supplied vegetables to London restaurant Quaglino’s, where John was sous-chef). Were they happy to be working together? Nope. ‘I don’t think John was delighted. He thought I was a bit wild,’ said Gregg.
But it was a two-way worry. ‘I couldn’t live with John. He brings all the clothes he’s going to wear for the series and chucks them on the floor. My things are lined up neatly, his attempts at folding are like origami,’ said Gregg. ‘We’ve never been to each other’s houses and we don’t cook for each other as we’d have to be polite. It would be like taking your wife to work.’ Since then, of course, John has been Gregg’s best man at his most recent wedding – his fourth.