The Making of Britishness

How Two Fat Ladies sold British food to the world

Against the backdrop of a style-driven, food fetishizing capital, Eighties Britain appeared to have lost its sense of humour. Conspicuous consumerism was not funny; it was a display of aspiration and super-affluence among the young, up and coming professional known as ‘yuppy’.

As Thatcher’s dream of an individualistic society found its roots, the rise of the super-chef seemed to be more about feeding the ego than competing with a rising trend in world class cuisine coming out of Melbourne, Sydney, San Fransisco and New York. Foreign travel – both for business and increasingly for pleasure as the cost of flights came down – was encouraging a more worldly British public to bring home new ideas, flavours and taste, and television was reflecting the conflicting stories that we were beginning to tell about ourselves.

The eighties and nineties were also an era of ‘moral panic' around food and not just in Britain as the media seized on a series of scares.  In the UK in 1986 ‘mad cow disease’ or BSE was first identified in cattle, yet despite fears that eating beef could affect humans and an admission by the government that a new brain disease vCJD was probably linked to BSE, in 1990, the then agriculture Minister John Selwyn Gummer appeared before the media to eat a hamburger with his daughter. In 1995, nineteen-year-old Stephen Churchill became the first known victim of a new variant of Creutzfeld Jakobs disease (vCJD).  

In 1988, two million chickens were slaughtered after junior health minister of the time, Edwina Currie suggested that ‘most egg production’ in Britain was tainted with salmonella. And the incidence of reported Listeria infections increased dramatically during the 1980 across the world; in 1985, a Mexican-style cheese was thought to be responsible for 142 cases with forty-eight deaths in Los Angeles in 1985. In the late 1980s an outbreak in the UK was associated with pâté causing more than 350 cases with over ninety deaths.

Throughout the 1990s, listeria was linked to smoked mussels in New Zealand, raw milk soft cheese, pork tongue in jelly and ‘rillettes’ or potted pork in France, pasteurized chocolate milk in the USA, frankfurters in the USA and butter in Finland.  It seemed safer to eat food out of a tin or from a shrink-wrapped supermarket packet than to buy meat from a butcher or eggs or cheese from a farm shop or deli. When John Major’s government published its Health of the Nation report in 1992 evidencing the link between the great British diet of saturated fats and dairy with cancer and heart disease, we were told that we had got it all wrong.  What we needed was a more Mediterranean diet of olive oil, fruit and vegetables and red wine.

It would take another ten years before food scares and anxiety about the role of food in our lives led to the rebirth of artisan foods in the UK after centuries of industrialisation ruptured our relationship with the source of its production. But it did not halt the rise of the restaurant experience and the reinvention of ‘British’ food.

In 1995, Terence Conran opened his latest gastrodome, the 700 seater Mezzo in London’s Soho, a theatre of food to be seen eating the latest trends. At the same time, Gary Rhodes, chef at The Greenhouse restaurant in Mayfair, was commissioned by BBC Education to tour the UK to rediscover the Britishness of our indigenous culinary culture. His braised oxtail, Lancashire hotpot, and boiled bacon with pearl barley and lentils in the 1995 series Rhodes around Britain and the accompanying BBC book created a national conversation on what it meant to be British at a time when meat and farming seemed very scary indeed.

Pat Llewellyn was watching these elements come together to create the perfect storm. She told me that she was already thinking about her next food series after the success of Grow Your Greens, Eat Your Greens, and observing what Rick Stein and Gary Rhodes were doing on BBC2. ‘They were both very anti supermarket.  I'm not saying they started nose to tail but their values of proper food and buying British did feel very different to what was going on on the telly.’

Llewellyn wanted to do something different. ‘I wanted to reflect what people were doing domestically.’ Llewellyn had worked on Channel 4’s magazine series on the politics of food, Food File (1993-1997) where storytelling and eccentric characters created a new narrative around British ingredients. Llewellyn agreed; ‘We were always finding kipper-smokers in God knows where or going to see sausage makers.’  

This style of televisual storytelling served to ground the heady fashionista food culture that characterised London in the mid-nineties, and brought it home to the hills and coasts of Britain. Honing in on the passion of the farmers, these ‘foodies’ were the people who grew it rather than chose the dish to go with the dress.

Llewellyn pulled focus on the characters behind British food. ‘I'd done Eat your Greens with Jane Root and Sophie Grigson and that was all about crazy people doing things with vegetables, and I'd met Clarissa (Dickson Wright) on that shoot. She was growing cardoons on a friend's garden in Skegness or something. I thought she was great and we kept in touch. I wanted to do something else with her and it took a while to work out what that was.’

The result was Llewellyn’s ground breaking series Two Fat Ladies (1996-1999), a triumph of British storytelling.  As Clarissa Dickson Wright and Jennifer Paterson rode on motorbike and sidecar through the breath-taking British countryside, stopping in idyllic country villages to cook game or to prepare a feast for lacrosse team at Westonbirt, an exclusive school for girls, they caricatured a Britain recognisable from Ealing comedies and period dramas.   Bossy and eccentric, Dickson Wright has been compared to the stout British matron, Margaret Rutherford who starred in the Ealing comedy Passport to Pimlico, a film that is all about British national identity and austerity politics, and as Miss Marple in the 1960s, calling upon a nostalgia often found since in British food programmes.

  Two Fat Ladies created an almost tactile quality to a screen experience with its utterly delightful gluttony and pastiche of the British upper classes. It was about friendship, adventure and fun, providing new opportunities to play with food while encouraging viewers to salivate over the dishes they made. 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.’ 

Its opening sequence set the scene for the parody of Britishness which would sell across the world: A fairy tale storybook opens to reveal a cartoon of Jennifer and Clarissa aboard motorbike and sidecar accompanied by 1960s style children’s story time music. We hear a roar as the two fat ladies blast off the page to a jazz score, dodging bottles of olive oil and plates of seafood. ‘Grab that crab, Clarissa’, sing-speaks Jennifer as Clarissa joins her with ‘Eat that meat, Jennifer’.  ‘Fasten your taste buds for a gastronomic ride’ they both growl as the trumpet screams and the cartoon bikers hurtle off screen.  The cartoon morphs as the real life Two Fat Ladies ride through the wintery lanes of Winchester to meet choristers of the city’s cathedral who they plan to feed them stuffed goose and Christmas pudding bombe after their last service on Christmas Day.

The combination of high production values and quirky storytelling (Two Fat Ladies, Nigella, Naked Chef) which uses caricatures of Britishness quickly became a powerful and sophisticated branding for British Food as sales of British food programmes soared across global territories, and in particular, America. Without the embedded storyline that food plays in so many other countries, producers like Llewellyn could use the blank page of British food culture, and our historic ability to brand Britain’s authority to manipulate and construct the British food myth.

Pat Llewellyn told me how it came about when we met at her offices at Optomen in 2012. ‘I'd gone off in all sorts of different directions to start with’ she told me. ‘I started off thinking “oh my gosh,  I've got this posh middle aged woman so maybe I need a young working class wine writer or something”. I was trying to find a pair for her. I started off looking for the opposite because she was quite a strong flavour.  And then it was a friend of mine who met Jennifer at a party and he said “oh my God I've just another of your posh old girls.” He said she's even posher than Clarissa. He was a friend of mine who I'd worked with on Wall to Wall. And I thought “well let's go for it. If we're going to do posh and fat and middle aged, let's do it with knobs on.’’’

While Clarissa Dickson Wright and Jennifer Paterson as the Two Fat Ladies were an inspired antidote to the fashionable foodies eating out in London’s growing food scene, they were also a deliberate poke in the eye at the Government’s advice on healthy eating. ‘There was that whole Mediterranean diet thing going on’ said Llewellyn about the response to the Government’s Health of the Nation report which advised a diet rich in olive oil and fresh fruit and vegetable. ‘There was lots of butter and they revelled in eating fat and things that weren't conventionally good for you’ said Llewellyn. ‘I think in a way that was part of the appeal. There was a lot of (she gestures a two finger salute) going on.’

The Carnivalesque quality of the Two Fat Ladies was about the subversion of good manners and behaviour that society would expect of women of a certain age and class when she was making the series. ‘I do think that it (the success) was the fact that they were middle aged and naughty and badly behaved,’ said Llewellyn. ‘Jennifer smoked and drank on telly. It was outrageously bad behaviour.’ Bakhtin’s notion of Carnivalesque derives from the medieval Feast of Fools when church officials would deliberately challenge authority through loutish behaviour. Interestingly, Paterson’s uncle with whom she lived was a Gentleman at Arms to the Cardinal Archbishops of Westminster.  

The Two Fat Ladies, Clarissa Dickson Wright and Jennifer Paterson found licence to prod at the dominant representation of women on television;  they not only drank too much, smoked and ate too much butter but rode around the country on Paterson’s Triumph Thunderbird motorbike  with Dickson Wright stuffed into its sidecar. Their love of excess spilled over televisual boundaries, upsetting assumptions about class and femininity. Bakhtin suggested that humour and chaos has the power to challenge assumptions about the status quo, but academic, Louise Fitzgerald says that Bakhtin’s carnival is only temporary;  ‘the rebellion is short-lived and works only to reinstate the social order because carnival is always sanctioned by those in authority as a way of mediating any form of rebellion. It’s why slaves were given a day off for carnival by slave owners, a seemingly benevolent act that actually worked to downplay  acts of rebellion for the slaves.’,

She believes that these women would not have been seen as  a signifier of femininity in the first place because their age and weight already takes up ‘too much space’. They are not feminine enough for the carnival to work.  She added that their class status allows them to behave in this manner; ‘we would expect them to be eccentric and to behave in ways that other women would not be allowed to behave. It might have been much more Carnivalesque to have had two middle class yummy mummies behaving in such subversive ways.’ Llewellyn says she finds class ‘really interesting. It’s a rich source for telly, isn't it? We categorise people all the time in telly. I think we were probably having a bit of fun and poking a bit of fun at their toffeeness.’

In America, Two Fat Ladies represented the antithesis of political correctness. David Richards in The Washington Post wrote:  ‘if excess poundage is considered an idiosyncrasy or, at most, an inconvenience in Great Britain, it takes on the dimensions of a moral flaw in the United States. Fat equals indulgence. Indulgence is weakness and weakness is deplorable. In that sense, the Two Fat Ladies, blissfully unconcerned with any such foolishness, are liberators, come to free the adipose from self-loathing.’  

Food TV Producer, Nick Thorogood says that the show is still doing tremendously well on the Cooking Channel in the US. ‘Now I find that fascinating’, he told me. ‘Two very British people from a very specific sort of background put together in a way that was interestingly constructed but appear to have this great jolly hockey sticks friendship, which they may well have done by the time they filmed the series.  And they make this food that’s very British: ‘let’s put in seven pints of cream and make a fabulous big set custard’.. And yet it’s appealing hugely to a US market. I find that very interesting.’

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