The other award-winners

Delia Smith truly scrumptious oldie of the year

Delia Smith, national treasure, turned 80 in June, with 21 million book sales and a 50-year career under her belt.

The woman who taught the nation how to cook is about to switch gear and do for the national consciousness what she did for the breakfast egg. Her new book, You Matter, out in March 2022, promises reflections on the most pressing problems of our times, including COVID and climate change, by the woman responsible for teaching home cooks what our mothers never did.

The Delia effect happened gradually: not so much a national culinary revolution as a gentle return to postwar gastronomic sanity in the 1970s. In the 1980s, curious cooks, already beguiled by Elizabeth David but still unsure of how to deliver, began to notice that the food at dinner parties was no longer likely to be something to be endured rather than enjoyed. ‘It’s a Delia,’ was the response from the cook hostess congratulated by grateful guests on the perfect roast chicken with tarragon.

A regular churchgoer and convert to Catholicism, Delia more than made up for leaving school without a single O level through the award of two honorary degrees, three fellowships and a pair of gongs from the monarch. She was appointed CBE in 2009 and Companion of Honour in 2017.

Delia and her journalist husband, Michael Wynn-jones, suppor Norwich City. Even her half-time rant in 2005 at fans of her beloved Norwich (‘Let’s be having you!’) was endearing.

Michael does most of the home cooking while his wife gardens.

‘It’s all completely fine,’ she says, ‘as long as he sticks to the recipe.’

After announcing her final retirement from the small screen in 2013, Delia remains a guiding light to home cooks through her books, online cookery school and cool, calm, collected Youtube videos – the perfect antidote to the antics of Masterchef, an enterprise for which she doesn’t have much time: ‘Food isn’t theatre… Our problem is we don’t think highly enough of it. It can speak for itself and it’s wonderful and it’s beautiful and it’s art – it’s everything.’

Quite so. National treasure indeed. Elisabeth Luard

Sir Les Patterson wizard from oz oldie of the year

It’s like the ravens leaving the Tower of London. Sir Les Patterson – that towering titan of international diplomacy, Australian cultural attaché to the Court of St James and Chairman of the Australian Cheese Board – is retiring.

Les, 80 next year, is stepping down to spend less time with his wife, top hand-model Gwen, and his children, Craig and Karen. There’s still plenty of lead in his pencil, though, as he explores exciting new openings with Holly, his glamorous personal assistant. Sir Les will maintain his hobbies: pocket billiards and sauna construction in Thailand.

He continues his column in The Old Fella, aka The Oldie – and will expand his literary oeuvre. Hot releases by Sir Les include The Traveller’s Tool (1985), The Enlarged and Extended Tool (2005), his platinum-selling LP, 12 Inches of Les, and his 1985 Christmas Number One, Give Her One for Christmas.

Born in Sydney in 1942, Sir Les has been showered with golden honours since his five-day crash course in world culture at Sydney University. An honorary Cambridge doctorate followed.

The award comes ten years after his compatriot Barry Humphries was recognised by the Oldie Academy.

Here’s hoping this honour will bring the two legends – who haven’t always seen eye to eye and can’t bear to be in the same room – closer together. Harry Mount

Whispering Bob Harris poptastic oldie of the year

Bob Harris, 75, keeps his records in a well-appointed Portakabin in the garden of his home in Oxfordshire.

When he left police college and fell in with the hippies in London in 1967, he got rid of some of the shorter-haired records. When he split up with his first wife in the early ’70s, he left a load of the longer-haired LPS behind. Thankfully the split was amicable enough for him to go back and visit them. When he was in a court case over a debt in the ’90s, he successfully argued that his records shouldn’t be seized because they were the tools of his trade.

During the 50 years Bob Harris has been a national figure, there have been tough patches. As the figurehead of The Old Grey Whistle Test in the ’70s, he was always the one who was going to get the abuse, some of it physical. He’s served his time in the less-celebrated regions of broadcasting. There has been more than one health crisis. He came back from prostate cancer in 2007 and more recently a heart problem.

He was a casualty of Matthew Bannister’s mid-’90s night of the long knives at Radio 1. Bannister later confessed his only regret was moving Bob from his overnight show. He’s stuck around long enough to have the last laugh, in his case as the undisputed owner of the segment of the market they like to call New Country – basically rock and roll with its shirt tucked in.

Ask him what his all-time favourite record is, and he’ll say it’s something that he’s only just discovered today. It’s a cute line. Then again, as his erstwhile tormentors the Sex Pistols would say, he means it, man. David Hepworth

Roger Mcgough oldie people’s poet of the year

At 83, Roger Mcgough is our much-loved ‘patron saint of poetry’ (according to Carol Ann Duffy, Poet Laureate). This year, he confronted the dark times of COVID with a new volume of poems called Safety in Numbers: ‘Safety in numbers? Not any more/ The room starts to fill/ I’m out of the door.’

It’s five decades since Mcgough arrived on everyone’s bookshelves with The Mersey Sound, the 1967 Penguin anthology of three witty young poets from Liverpool – Adrian Henri, Brian Patten and Roger Mcgough.

Roger was the nicest and best connected: as one of The Scaffold, along with John Gorman and Paul Mccartney’s brother, Mike Mcgear, he had a numberone hit with Lily the Pink in 1968.

How we enjoy his humour, aphorisms ( Tomorrow Has Your Name on It is full of sound advice), fantasies (admen ‘turn[ing] the moon into a Coca-cola sign’) and arch puns. My favourite is Icarus Allsorts, a satirical anti-war poem.

His verse memoirs about his childhood, as a docker’s son who won a scholarship to St Mary’s College, Crosby, are poignant; his poems about modern life are fierce. He sits in the armchair by the nation’s hearth, presenting Radio 4’s Poetry Please. Mcgough has clear-eyed, unsentimental views of approaching old age. ‘Let me die a young man’s death’ was his original sentiment; later he updated this to ‘Not for me a young man’s death.’

He is repelled by metal and unimpressed by speed. On capital punishment, he says, ‘I live in the capital and it’s punishment.’ Valerie Grove

Dr & Dr Datta oldie nhs angels of the year

During the most perilous, pressured 18 months in the NHS’S history, one married couple in their eighties hit Olympian levels of work to keep the whole show on the road.

As COVID raged across the country and the world, Dr Mridul Kumar Datta and Dr Saroj Datta rolled up their sleeves. Working alongside each other, they have notched up over 110 years of exemplary service to the NHS.

Both now 81, they qualified at the Medical College of Calcutta (Kolkata), attended by Mridul’s grandfather and great-grandfather. The doctors received their diplomas in 1964 and the following year travelled to the UK, where they became Members of the Royal College of Obstetrics and Gynaecology.

Mridul opened his own Stepping Stones practice in 1971. That same year, he also launched the north-west’s first vasectomy clinic. Later on, he pioneered out-of-hours services in Blackburn when he founded Our Medical Services.

Stepping Stones moved to its current location in the Audley Health Centre in Stoke-on-trent in 1974. It now serves more than 5,500 people.

Mridul was awarded an honorary fellowship from the Royal College of Obstetrics and Gynaecology in 1992 and another from the Faculty of Family Planning and Sexual Health in 2006.

Saroj joined the NHS in 1965 as a locum at the Blackburn Royal Infirmary and moved on to the Obstetrics and Gynaecology department of Queen’s Park Hospital. She worked in various departments of the NHS, from A&E to pathology and public health.

Saroj, who is fluent in four languages, joined Stepping Stones in 1975. She still welcomes each infant patient into the practice and delivers their first immunisations, as she has continued to do throughout the pandemic. Often four generations of the same family have called on these two doctors’ services.

Originally intending to return to India to be married, Mridul and Saroj felt so welcomed by Blackburn that in 1965 they were married at the Blackburn Registry Office.

Their family are following in their footsteps, with one consultant endocrinologist daughter and a granddaughter who is studying medicine.

Donna Freed Margaret Seaman oldie champion knitter of the year

Margaret Seaman, from Great Yarmouth, did something exceptional in lockdown. At 92, she’s spent the last two years making a magnificent model of the Queen’s Sandringham Estate – in wool.

Margaret used to knit for her children and grandchildren. After losing her husband, she joined a local knitting group and, as she told the BBC, ‘It all snowballed from there.’ The end result is this stunning scale model, 18 feet long by six feet wide.

Margaret spent between 10 and 12 hours on it, almost every day, for months on end. She was often up half the night.

The detail is delightful: from the latticed windows of Sandringham House to the crenellated battlements of the church tower. Knitted foliage reflects the towering trees that surround the Queen’s private retreat.

Last summer, Margaret’s creation went on show at the Norfolk Makers’ Festival, at the Forum in Norwich, to raise funds for local hospitals. ‘If I can think of something to do that we can show to people, and raise money for a charity, it would be something worthwhile,’ she reflected. Hear, hear!

During the Second World War, Sandringham’s lawns were ploughed up and planted with vegetables, to support the nation’s Dig for Victory campaign. To support Britain’s hospitals,we should have a Knit for Victory drive. Margaret Seaman must be in charge. William Cook