The Gamechanger

Posh Pat, TV's Culinary Queen

Although Mark Thompson and Jane Root should be credited with being the creators of Food Television in Britain, they are, arguably, the midwives of a style created by Pat Llewellyn.

Llewellyn had worked on Food File (Channel 4) the series responsible for Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s first TV appearance. She had also responded to one of the first calls for lifestyle entertainment ideas producing Grow Your Greens, Eat your Greens, with Sophie Grigson before joining Optomen in 1994 where she would conceive and produce Two Fat Ladies. 

Jane Root had first seen the ‘visual delight and visual joy’ she wanted from BBC2’s food programmes in Llewellyn’s Grow Your Greens, Eat your Greens . ‘I still remember that series with such warmth and affection because it really was about people who just loved it. And Pat’s pumpkin grower show was just this wonderful country guy who talked about his pumpkins. And Clarissa Dickson Wright was there talking about cardoons. And it was really wonderful.’  Root had been executive producer on the series at Wall to Wall. ‘I remember we took a decision really early on that we weren’t going to talk about anything to do with pests. People can figure that out somewhere else. The food was going to be delightful.’ 

She said that it felt revolutionary; ‘I think it was that we moved from food being really serious to being enjoyable. Sophie was in her later 20s, early 30s, as we all were, and it felt like it was our generation that were grasping that and being a bit more exuberant about it.’ Food TV was about enjoying food rather than working hard at it. A Channel 4 executive told me that Root was a game-changer. ‘Jane says it’s all about tips and tricks; she was the first person to structure shows in a documentary way so that if I were a viewer I'd learn something.’

Sophie Grigson’s pedigree – her mother was the influential food writer and journalist, Jane Grigson – added to her credibility to front shows about the best of British food but the idea of how to create a fresh style for a show about meat required a different set of skills. ‘Sophie would have had powerful philosophies’ said a Channel 4 executive ‘She may have brought the idea that what was needed was the curve ball from vegetables (Grow Your Greens...) to meat (Sophie’s Meat Course) but it would have been something she and Jane (Root) would have devised together. It would have been about bringing a body of cooking knowledge to someone like me who didn't know that stuff,’ she said.

It was the pursuit of ‘delight’ that introduced a haptic experience to Food Television, engaging viewers with the visceral pleasures of Two Fat Ladies which created an almost tactile quality to a screen experience which Llewellyn knew how to recreate with Jamie Oliver. 

Nicola Moody worked with Jane Root as Head of Factual while Llewellyn was making Two Fat Ladies which she describes now as ‘hilarious and wonderful ; the British eccentric at play.’  She tells me that Llewellyn knew more about food than anyone, ‘perhaps even more than Clarissa’, but told me that it was her ability to tell stories that sold British food programmes to the world.  ‘She came to us with a taster tape of Jamie,’ said Moody, remembering the moment when Llewellyn introduced Oliver to the Factual team at BBC2. ‘It was no more than five minutes in a pokey little kitchen with Jamie cutting up some green beans, as far as I remember. It wasn't beautifully shot but it had lots of energy.’

Jamie Oliver had first been seen on television in 1997 in a Christmas special on the River Café, the Hammersmith canteen run by Richard Rogers’ wife, Ruth and her partner, Rose Gray, one of the original chefs at the influential 192 in Notting Hill. Ruth Rogers remembered how effortless Oliver was in front of the camera; ‘Jamie was frying mushrooms. Rose says she thinks he was doing something else, but I think he was frying mushrooms. He could talk to the camera and be himself and that’s a very difficult thing to do. You're doing two things; you're trying to inform and educate and you have to be at ease with yourself and the camera in order to do that. And he was there.’

Llewellyn had been looking for a new chef and went to see him at the River Café.  As he made pasta, she spotted her star. ‘My mother has this thing that you can tell someone who can really cook by the way they use their hands and I’ve inherited that from her,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what it is.  He looked like he’d been doing it all his life – which he had.’ She took a taster tape to Jane Root who remembered what it was that greenlit the astonishing story of Jamie Oliver; ‘Pat Llewellyn came in and showed me three minutes of Jamie’ said Root. ‘It chimed with this thing about friendship and informality. He felt like he was all about that.’ 

Nicola Moody describes BBC2 of the time as a place ready to have a go. She remembers Mark Thomson saying ‘Ok, why not? Let's have a go’. ‘It really wasn't much more than that’, she said. I suggested that it was a heady mix of politics and culture at a time when supermarkets had begun to sell good wines and dinner parties could be more like a restaurant experience. I asked if BBC2 was trying to reflect this melting pot of aspiration and style, but she disagreed. ‘I don't remember thinking that the world has changed and we need something to reflect that. I remember thinking that everything looked a bit boring and we needed something new. Maybe it's the same thing. 

Moody said that BBC2 was feeling a bit old at the time. ‘It (the audience) was very female and late 30s’.  The average BBC2 viewer is now nearer 50 but at the time, Thompson, Root and Moody who were also in their thirties were keen to mirror some of the youthful dynamism that was evidenced by Britpop, the politically branded creativity that defined Britain in the mid/late 1990s. The then British Prime Minister, Tony Blair had pulled focus on a handful of successful British artists such as Tracey Emin and the band, Oasis to define a new ‘cool’.  ‘Jamie felt like he was part of that young British art movement,’ said Moody. ‘He was full of energy and fun and had an attitude. He was about freedom of expression. He wasn’t ‘trendy’ yet, and ‘cool’ isn't the right word’, she said. ‘There had been a lot of youth programmes that had been too cool. No-one wanted that anymore. This (The Naked Chef) was about aspiration, the idea that you could live in a city and have a good life.’

Nicola Moody commissioned a pilot, but, despite having found their man, it didn’t work. The chaotic informality of the screen test had been replaced by Oliver trying to explain over-complicated recipes in catering French to camera. He gabbled so much,’ said Llewellyn. ‘He was completely raw and everything came out at once.’ Nicola Moody remembered it well. ‘It was shot too conventionally, with the camera on legs. Jamie was talking down the lens. It didn’t have the energy that we’d seen in the taster which was handheld I'm pretty sure. It was dull. The mise- en-place was all done; everything was laid out in little bowls, ready to go. It didn’t seem like him. It all seemed very old fashioned. It was not what we wanted.’

Llewellyn had to tell Jane Root who, as head of independent commissioning, was the executive lead. Root remembered the moment; ‘I was driving somewhere and I was talking to Pat for an hour on the phone and we were just like ’Oh my God, it’s all going wrong. What are we going to do?’  Root gave her permission to dump £60,000 worth of pilot, lose the little bowls and start again. ‘Pat got rid of the director and all this cutting up.  He couldn’t really talk to camera then – it seems like a weird thing to remember, but she had that thing about talking to him from behind the camera.’

Moody suggested that what Llewellyn did next was revolutionary; by taking the camera off the legs (tripod) and asking the questions herself off-camera, taking away the bowls and simplifying the recipes, Llewellyn was able to ‘produce’ the ‘mockney geezer’ TV chef from the young chef at the River Café whom she had witnessed effortlessly making pasta while chatting to his team.  Moody is clear who created Jamie Oliver at that time; ‘Jamie was just the talent,’ she said. ‘He wouldn't have been involved with the creative decision.’ 

TV food changed forever with The Naked Chef. Former Food Network producer, Nick Thorogood remembers it well; ‘What was amazing about Jamie was he went, ‘Oh, we’re going to have a handful of flour,’ and he threw it, not into a bowl, but on a counter. ‘And a bit of this and a bit of that!’ and if you remember, every piece of the language went from precision into abstract. ‘Oh you bish bosh ….’. He agreed that what Pat Llewellyn did was unprecedented; ‘If you remember in Season One and Season Two, it is Pat off-camera literally saying to him, ‘what are you doing, why have you done this?’ and that brought the story to life. What was fascinating for me with that was that it had thrown out every convention, every rule of television before it in the food area - and many other areas actually.’

Media discourse refers to the construction of reality, while television calls it ‘producing’, but this is the creative impulse which is behind ‘TV gold’ and their subsequent cultural shifts.  As evidenced by Llewellyn’s instinctive decisions, the skill in ‘producing’ talent is to heighten or accentuate what is already there. Interestingly, John Diamond and his wife Nigella Lawson had just had also had spectacular success, this time on Channel 4, after Diamond encouraged the relaxed, playful side of his wife onto the screen, transforming a camera-shy journalist into a vampy domestic goddess. Far from duplicity, this talent for producing a heightened reality could be described as a ‘pure play of appearances that is not deceptive, but rather possesses a particular authenticity’ (Constable 2005:143 in Thornham 2007).

Authenticity in television is a contested term; the nature of its construction is about who holds the power and who sets the agenda. There can be no ‘real’ on the screen, according to media theorist, Heather Nunn ‘You can’t have any access to him (Jamie Oliver) other than through those highly mediated images’.

Nicola Moody illustrated this as she described how the Youth TV movement created by Janet Street Porter prompted TV to ‘move away from authenticity’ through programmes like Reportage which equated less movement with being what she called ‘cool and authoritative.’. Moody was editor of the programme and remembers being told by an executive to make sure that her presenters didn’t move their hands too much. ‘It was very controlled; it was cool to be calm like (the black-bobbed, shades-clad, super-stylish presenter) Magenta Devine.’ 

As producer of Jamie Oliver in The Naked Chef, Pat Llewellyn brought an end to this era, and arguably to our relationship with food and style in Britain. After Gary Rhodes, Ainsley Harriott and Rick Stein, Llewellyn’s Oliver offered something completely different.  ‘It was semi-real, semi-imagined’ Mark Thompson explained. ‘It was ambitious food that was practical and approachable. (Jamie) was a bit of an antidote, a different wave to the Gary Rhodes thing. The aspiration was to be a home chef, to have an incredibly delightful home experience. Sophie (Grigson) did a bit of it, Jamie hugely contributed, but it wasn’t about locking yourself in the kitchen and being on MasterChef. It was about it being part of your family life.’

Llewellyn would become one of the most influential producers in television.  She had a ‘vast effect on popular culture’ according to Journalist, Howard Byrom. ‘She's shaped the way we think about food, the way we treat the people who cook it, and, by proxy, the way it's marketed from the barrow boys to supermarkets.’ He called her ‘the scullery Spielberg, the culinary Cecil B de Mille’, and said that ‘thanks to her, mild-mannered housewives now smash garlic with their fists, toss salads with their bare hands, and taste the dressing by dipping in their fingers and slurping rather loudly’.

From Taste and the TV Chef, Gilly Smith, 2020. Reproduced with permission from Intellect Books. You can buy the book here.