The Manufacture of Delight

Putting a Doc Marten up the backside of British TV

The birth in November 1982 of Channel 4, a largely commercially funded public service television channel, had provided more than just a fourth channel to British broadcasting. Like the tiny clutch of London restaurants changing British food culture, it blasted an energy through television audiences and developed a new set of narratives for British society, telling stories of an increasingly diverse world in ways we had never seen before. 

Series like Network 7 and The Media Show would showcase new ideas in storytelling and break new talent both on screen and behind the camera. Janet Street Porter and her revolutionary ideas behind Network 7, an entertainment youth strand designed to look and feel like the mother of all hangovers for an as yet untargeted youth audience, would be quickly poached by Alan Yentob at BBC2, while Jane Root who founded Wall to Wall with Alex Graham would go on to head up the BBC Independent Commissioning Group in 1997 and become its first woman controller in 1999.

Channel 4 was a pioneer in capturing the spirit of Britain at a time when it was searching for a new post-austerity identity by doing what Britain has always done best – storytelling through fashion, art and music, self-deprecating comedy and social realism; at Channel 4, it could often happen in the same programme, as in its most memorable successes, The Tube and Brookside.

An unruly, amphetamined version of the BBC’s Top of the Pops, The Tube broke brand new ground by bringing bands from underground music scenes live to living rooms around the country, often regardless of sound quality and slick production values. The ‘talent’ was found among witty young journalists, Paula Yates and Muriel Gray and musician, Jools Holland whose use of the ‘f word’ in a trail for the show would eventually bring about its demise. If The Tube captured the narrative of British music, fashion and style, Brookside would do the same with British TV’s well established narrative of social realism with its stories of life on a suburban Liverpool housing estate, complete with family struggles, domestic violence, class wars and sex scandals.

Wild and fresh as Channel 4 was in the eighties as it put a Doc Marten up the backside of British TV, it was BBC2 where mouthy journalist, Janet Street Porter was able to bring her tabloid punk to a new concept of youth programming. As the new Head of Youth and Entertainment Features at the BBC in 1988 under the direction of BBC2 Controller Alan Yentob, she introduced her hip new narratives in Def II (1988-94), which pioneered the Rough Guides, a stylish travelogue presented by former Channel 4’s Network 7 stars, Magenta De Vine and Sankha Guha.

The impact was profound; while it may be hard to find the legacy of The Tube, The Media Show and Network 7 on the current Channel 4 (and, arguably, in its viewers), Street Porter’s approach to factual entertainment would set off a mind bomb across the BBC. How it would change TV News is the story for another book, but Mark Thompson who had just left Newsnight to become the editor of Nine o’clock News at the astonishingly tender age of 30 in 1988 may well have had his notepad out.

Street Porter’s Reportage which was part of the Def II strand aired weekly at 6pm on Mondays and Wednesdays and targeted at teenagers, took news seriously but loosened its tie. Its presenters were cooler, cleverer versions of their audience and told stories just slightly out of their reach. They brought new worlds to young people who had until now been patronised or neglected by television, educating, inspiring, modelling new ways of being cool. 

A cab ride away from the BBC in Wood Lane, W12 was the new frontier in British food culture. Here, BBC executives including BBC2 boss Mark Thompson and head of independent commissioning, Jane Root would lunch with independent producers and plot a new era in Factual TV. With Root heading up the BBC's brand new Independent Commissioning Group, the gates were open for the first time to ‘indies’, often small companies pitching for up to 25% of the channel’s programming. Thompson remembers those ‘power’ lunches at 192, Notting Hill’s first celebrity magnet ‘neighbourhood’ restaurant, but having started as a researcher at the BBC in 1979, he had been soaking up the food scene in Notting Hill for a while. ‘London was beginning to happen around the BBC in the ‘80s’, he told me.

Thompson and Root sniffed the winds of change and spotted a way of bringing a form of Britpop onto the plates of Britain way before the term had even been coined by Stuart Maconie. Jane Root had produced The Media Show for Channel 4 from 1987-1991 for her own production company, Wall to Wall and had already been approached by the channel to consider ways in which food could be made younger and fresher.

But in her new role at BBC2, a meeting of minds with Mark Thompson, by now controller at BBC2, would create a new feel for the channel based on something much more authentic than the usual drive for the Next Big Thing. Thompson and Root shared unusually foodie childhoods in the 1960s and ‘70s which set them apart from their peers; Thompson’s best friend at a British boarding school had lived in the Philippines during their earlier school days and would stay with him during half term breaks. At the age of 13, his friend moved to Rome and returned the favour by inviting Thompson to stay with him.  ‘Until I was 18 or 19, I was totally immersed in Italian food every half term’ he recalls. ‘I watched his mother cook what was just ordinary Roman food, but this was when spaghetti was still in tins in the UK. I became incredibly interested in food.’

Back home in London, he noticed that his male friends did not share his passion. ‘It was a male/female thing’, he said. ‘It was more unusual to be into food. There wasn’t so much money around before then. It felt exceptional to cook. There were little niches around like Books for Cooks and a few delis in Portobello. It was a counter culture. It was a bit like liking classical music or being gay at that time. It was edgy and cool.’ 

Jane Root had grown up in Essex, but it was her mother who influenced her unusual interest in food. Her mother had grown up in East London during the Second World War, spending much of her childhood in bomb shelters during the Blitz, surviving, like the rest of Britain, on rations. She was, Root told me, like any other woman of her age. But Root described how her choice to take evening classes in cookery was ‘crazy’ for a young working class mother in East London at that time. Yet, that the influence on Root would have enormous impact on British television.  ‘She endlessly experimented in our family with new ingredients. I remember her cutting up a whole bulb of raw garlic and putting it into a salad and everyone’s head exploding. And she said, ‘ah maybe that didn’t work’.  And the first time I had an avocado and a red pepper... She was always experimenting.’

It’s important to emphasize just how unusual it would have been for senior management of a certain age in London at that time to share this experience, and both Root and Thompson mentioned this in their interviews. Pat Llewellyn, an independent producer who had developed new ideas around food programmes with Root at Wall to Wall, also had a childhood immersed in food. Llewellyn’s parents ran a small hotel and restaurant in South Wales, an area not known for its cooking in those days, and, miles away from the nearest big city, it was an unlikely spot to find customers interested in being seen to eat in the ‘right place’. ‘They were very into feeding people generously and sending people away happy,’ Llewellyn told me of her parents.  ‘They knew about food from the ground up; ‘my dad’s side of the family were all farmers or grew their own food, but my mother had an understanding of what was going on in the seventies and brought a tiny bit of sophistication to the place. She read everything – Elizabeth David and all those Robert Carrier part-works. I think my mum and dad probably brought the first Duck a l’Orange to Newcastle Emlyn!’ 

According to Root, her mother wasn’t on the ‘same social level’ as Llewellyn’s. She was a home cook, but from her earliest memories, there were many family stories about food.  ‘I remember the first time she bought asparagus.  She was newly married. She cooked it for about 20 minutes in the way you used to cook spinach, and it was inedible. She remembered it was (about) being very brave. My parents were working class kids who were making their way. They were really passionate about possibilities of the new world and food was part of that. As a family, we used to eat Vesta curries, you know, horrible things, but at the time you thought “hey, we’re going to eat foreign food”. My dad had been in the Army in India and loved Indian food. ‘

This passion for food was about more than chopping and cooking; Root explained that growing up thinking about how things looked and tasted felt like ‘possibility in a new world’ and would inspire many of the series she commissioned or produced at BBC, Channel 4 and as president at Discovery Networks.  ‘A lot of programmes I made as an exec or a commissioning editor were things that my family were obsessed with,’ she said. ‘That’s where all those programmes on industrial archaeology came from. It was about being brave and trying out new things.’

As the first female controller of BBC2, she would bring the spirit of freelance journalism from her work on women’s magazines like Honey and Cosmopolitan as well as the lifestyle pages of The Guardian. She would introduce some of the most successful exports such as What Not to Wear , Top Gear, and Who Do you Think You Are to the BBC, creating trends from the audience’s increasing interest in hobbying – or, the new buzz word in television – ‘leisure’.  She would also commission Pat Llewellyn to produce The Naked Chef which not only gave her the moniker ‘high priestess of Lifestyle TV’ but would herald Llewellyn as one of the most influential producers in television. 

Thompson and Root worked closely from 1997 as together they navigated the new territory being carved by the independent production companies; ‘The indies were fascinated by food, but in-house was already creating programmes like Delia. I had to pivot that,’ said Thompson.  How to develop Delia to stand up against an influx of fresh food ideas was Thompson’s biggest challenge.  Delia Smith was the BBC’s signature dish attracting vast audiences with her quiet, school marm charm and detailed instructions on how to cook. ‘She was our biggest star,’ said Thompson. ‘She had an ability to empty supermarket shelves.’ But the new kid on the block, Channel 4 putting up a good fight in the ratings war, it was time to rethink what other ingredients might create a new flavour in BBC food.

By the end of the 1980s, the BBC had launched its own food magazine, Good Food filled with chat and ideas about food from TV chefs such as Antony Worrall Thompson, Keith Floyd, Ken Hom and Madhur Jaffrey. BBC2 featured some of the new stars of the London scene, such as Gary Rhodes who was re-inventing ‘British’ food such as faggots and oxtail at The Greenhouse in Mayfair, gently moving food from a ‘how to’ documentary style into a more aspirational ‘lifestyle’ genre. 

After cookery shows such as Moira Meighn’s single-ring cookery in 1936 and Philip  Harben’s Cookery in 1946, both instructional and rather dull, early TV chefs like Fanny Cradock tried to recreate the performance. Against a backdrop of aspirational cookery and a new era of mass consumerism encouraged by the post war boom and the rise of advertising across the Western world,  a media-constructed housewife was encouraged to  believe that consumer goods, whiter, cleaner clothes and impressive cookery skills would connect her to the fantasy of a ‘good society’ perpetuated by the mass media. The myth of the 1950s housewife in apron and stilettos symbolised a glamour that was designed to rework the traditions of cleaning and cooking into something that promised control over one’s life. In the US, it was even called ‘The American Dream’.

Media executive, Peter Bazalgette believes that ‘Fanny actually had an entertainment gene. She was a lousy cook but she was quite a good entertainer. And she used to do live food shows for the Daily Telegraph in the ‘50s. There was one wonderful occasion when they were rehearsing and the presenter, McDonald Hobley arrived. She said, ‘I’m stuffing a turkey would you kindly f**k off!’ and the presenter got on a train and went back to London! But the point is she was a very strong-minded, very entertaining. She understood the idea of cabaret. She had Johnnie doing the wine – so actually a lot of what happened later (for example in Bazalgette’s Food and Drink on BBC2) was there.’

In the late 60s, The Galloping Gourmet romped into BBC’s Continuing Education whose remit was to teach the nation to cook. The department had already started commissioning a wider range of cookery programmes to reflect the richer food culture of Britain’s changing demographic, and the increase in business travel in the 1980s which inspired a small but significant interest in the different roles food could play in our lives from health to fine dining and cultural fusion.  In 1982 Ken Hom's Chinese Cookery and Madhur Jaffrey's Indian Cookery brought an exotic addition to the channel, which had also just commissioned Food and Drink, the first British food show to discuss the subject seriously without the ‘how to’ format.

Hom and Jaffrey were two of the early examples of the British audience’s interest in the stories of food, taking it out of the studio and onto location, bringing the first hint that food could be about much more than chopping and cooking. Paula Trafford, Hom’s executive producer on Eat, Drink, Cook China explained how important early family experiences are in shaping a relationship with food. ‘Ken Hom’s mother tried to keep his identity by doing a Chinese lunchbox at school’, she told me. ‘He felt alienated from his Chinese roots, and realised how important to hang on to his identity. Food was a big part of that.’

Keith Floyd on Fish brought a new attitude to food programmes in the mid 80s, extending the Galloping Gourmet’s portrait of a food loving lush into a travelogue of a bon viveur.  But it was his style ‘inspired by chaos’ (Guardian, 2009) that was to shake up the food television of the 1980s.  His informal attitude would loosen the stays around food which was still at this time an uncomfortable fit with the British way of life.  ‘Keith Floyd gave birth to that whole style of TV programme in the ‘80s’ said Antony Worrall Thompson, ‘and then we wanted more and more of it.  Dinner parties were all carrot and coriander soup, floating nasturtiums and fish that had been cooked to death. We were desperate for knowledge but we didn’t put it into practice very often. Suddenly Floyd made everything very relaxed. It was radical – telling the camera to come in and have a look, while Floyd himself was having a glass of wine. Robert Carrier was in a studio, The Galloping Gourmet was entertainment but then it disappeared completely, and when the Roux Brothers and Delia came along, it was about education. Floyd was about bringing it back to entertainment again.’

While BBC2 became the home of food, taking its viewers to exotic locations and explaining what food meant to the rest of the world, Food and Drink was the channel’s flagship food magazine programme from 1984-2001. It was produced by Peter Balzagette who brought to it the spirit of tabloid journalism of Esther Rantzen That’s Life where he had been a researcher in the ‘70s.  Rantzen’s would-be husband and producer of the show, Desmond Wilcox had been ‘inspired’ by the format of the 1960s consumer affairs show, On The Braden Beat which also featured comics, Peter Cook, Jake Thackray and Tim Brooke-Taylor and  Bazalgette feasted on the ideas, learning on the job that factual information could be entertaining.

The pitch for the food consumer magazine show would lead to the series which ran from 1984 to 2001 and secured his place in television history. He remembered a seminal moment in 1985. ‘One of the Food and Drink presenters – a guy called Chris Kelly – made a film at the Dorchester about some dinner that Anton Mosimann was cooking for because he was the chef there at the time. When he came back afterwards having made the film he said, ‘He’s a really interesting guy, Anton Mosimann, what would it be like if we sent him to cook for an ordinary family?’ So I said, ‘Yeah, let’s do that.’’ Mossiman was sent to a council house in Sheffield and on budget for what Bazalgette remembers as ‘just under five quid’, he cooked a three course Sunday lunch. ‘It was an overnight sensation. That’s when the celebrity chef started. And it was Chris Kelly’s idea.’ Bazalgette smiled; ‘I’ve probably got a bit of an entertainment gene in myself.’

He would go on to create format entertainment cookery shows which would sell around the world like Ready, Steady, Cook! (Ready, Set, Cook! in US) and Can’t Cook, Won’t Cook and mastermind the birth of Reality TV with Big Brother. He explained how under the control of Michael Jackson at BBC2, Ready Steady Cook became the first formatted cookery/entertainment show; ‘(Jackson said) ‘I think I’d like a sort of food show in the afternoons, I think it could be quite entertaining, I don’t know what it is. Can you do something?’ I don’t suppose I did it on my own but that’s how I came up with the basic format for Ready Steady Cook! A producer did all the wonderful casting and everything else.’

The competition between two celebrity chefs was about making the best recipe with a bag of ingredients bought on a budget of £5, and an early example of Bazalgette’s drive to democratise television by making what had been considered an elitist subject more accessible, but it was dismissed by food pundits. ‘There were a lot of posh gits, stuck up food critics who derided it,’ Bazalgette remembered. ‘But actually it had a lot of extremely clever talented chefs working on it. They invented a sort of new cuisine - everything had to be cooked in twenty minutes’ Making a soufflé in a microwave, using traditional techniques but adapting them to the needs of the clock, it was what Bazalgette calls ‘cuisine in miniature’.

Bazalgette would go on to become chair of the British Arts Council and in 2016, chairman of ITV. He is widely credited with being one of the most influential men in independent television, and in food culture. Like Thompson, Root and Llewellyn, he also had an unusually foodie childhood. At 62, he has had a charmed life; the great-great-grandson of Sir Joseph Bazalgette, the Victorian civil engineer responsible for the design of London sewers, he had a privileged upbringing, with seasonal produce grown in the family’s three-acre garden. ‘We had a gardener who used to come and ask my mum what she wanted that day for lunch and dinner and he would go away and cut it, pick it. So there was this constant supply of fresh fruit and vegetables from the gardens which we used to eat and which my mother used to cook in different ways. She loved cooking, and my father was particularly into wine, so I knew quite a lot about food and liked it.’  Like Thompson, he was unusual among his male friends in learning to cook before I went to university. ‘I remember being in demand with some friends to cook for dinner. I don’t think I did it very well. It was a dog on its hind legs; it wasn’t done well but you were surprised to see it done at all.’ 

I told him that Mark Thompson was also one of the very few men he knew who liked to cook at university, and Bazalgette laughed and asked if it had done anything for his sex life. It’s a telling remark; for Thompson, being able to cook was ‘about iconoclasm and identity, eccentricity’; for Bazalgette it was ‘not just (to make you) salivate but something to make you laugh and something to make you smile, something to make you think there’s some joy in this.’  With hindsight, Bazalgette’s model comes from this light touch to his subjects; he would go on to make successful shows in other subjects such as the makeover formats Groundforce and Changing Rooms and use this same approach to revolutionise gardening and DIY. Compared to their competitors which he described as ‘bloodless’, these shows were about emotion. ‘They created narrative and joy and surprise and reveals.’ 

Food and Drink was more about ‘entertainment, human interest, narrative, and information’ than the high emotion of the make-over shows, humanity, warmth and charm rather than their jeopardy and big finishes. It played a vital part in the TV food revolution; by the end of the 1990s, Food and Drink would spearhead the changing relationship between the BBC and the supermarkets.  As viewers responded to the suggestions of wine experts Jilly Goolden and Oz Clarke, supermarket buyers expanded their wine offer and explored new markets to feed the audience’s insatiable desire for their recommendations.  It took the confidence of a TV maverick to negotiate one of the central principles of the BBC; ‘We drove a coach and horses through that,’ said Bazalgette referring to the BBC ban on product placement. ‘You could say we were leading it, following it or going in lockstep with it, I don’t know which of those three, but the supermarket revolution (went) from having about two thousand lines (in wine) to having seven or eight thousand lines. And that was when suddenly you could buy thirty different sorts of olive oil from six different countries. We popularised that. We would taste these things and recommend particular products. When Jilly and Oz used to recommend a wine, it might sell quarter of a million bottles.’

Delia Smith did the same for ingredients, most notably, cranberries which she recommended in the 1995 book and series, Delia's Smith's Winter Collection.  In 1998, the series How to Cook and its accompanying BBC book caused a rush on eggs, lump-free flour and omelette pans. It seemed that audiences could not get enough; ‘TV cooking sensation Delia Smith has thrown manufacturers of obscure ingredients into a production frenzy ahead of her new series How to Cook - Part Two,’ warned BBC News in 2000. The show advised on store cupboard ingredients, with Delia recommending a new set of basics including Maldon Sea Salt and Worcestershire Sauce’. 

BBC2 was now the third most watched channel in the UK and had won the prestigious ‘Channel of the Year’ two years running at the Edinburgh International Television Festival. Jane Root was controller from 1999 to 2004 and continued the relationship with the buyers; ‘We actually had to start telling the supermarkets in advance what ingredients…were going to be her (Delia’s) magic ingredient.  The power of Delia was that she could say that dried cranberries are this most amazing thing. It was like six months in advance to source the ingredients otherwise people were so upset. People were outraged if freshly ground pepper was nowhere to be found.’ People were learning to cook through entertainment shows which brought a new joy to the educative aspect of food, and translating it directly into both economic and cultural capital at the supermarket. ‘It was a time, when the public were voting with their feet,’ said Bazalgette.  ‘They were taking these practical suggestions from Delia and Michael Barry (co-presenter with Chris Kelly of Food and Drink 1984 -2001) and others and going to the supermarket and buying it.’

Jane Root referred to BBC2 shows like Food and Drink and Delia as ‘serious’ but the former glossy magazine editor noticed that they lacked a certain something.  ‘What they didn’t have was visual delight and visual joy’, she told me. Peter Bazalgette agreed, at least with the criticism of Delia. ‘It was like being told what to do by a primary school headmistress. Delia was authentic and people trusted her, but she wasn’t there to entertain people. She wasn’t even there to make them smile. She was there to tell them how to boil an egg, and woe betide you if you didn’t do it the way she said you ought to.’

It was Thompson and Root who would change this in Delia’s How to Cook. Thompson had already begun to rethink food at the BBC; ‘Rick Stein had just arrived. He was a teacher too but we’d introduced a bit of character - like the dog. We were hanging around quaysides in Cornwall. We were beginning to open out of the TV studio into what you might call lifestyle.’  Suddenly, Delia felt stuck and out of date. Research about food in the ‘90s was driven by fear’, Mark Thompson told me. ‘With food viewers aging, we were asking if there were different ways to do food.’ Inspired by a cookbook his mother had given him when he had gone to university, he had a radical idea. ‘I said ‘why don’t we start from scratch?’ Let’s teach Britain to cook.’  The result, Delia’s series How to Cook would run over three series and 28 episodes from 1998-2002.

Seamus Geoghegan was director of the lifestyle and the multimedia division at BBC Worldwide at the time, overseeing magazines such as BBC Good Food and Gardeners’ World and believes that without Thompson, Root and Llewellyn, BBC TV food would have been a very different offer. He agreed with me that it was their unusually personal interest in food that was the driver. ‘(It was) that passion that they had for the subject and belief in the talent to deliver it’, he told me.  I told him what Thompson had told me about his half terms in Rome. It didn’t surprise Geoghegan. ‘I didn’t know what Mark’s backstory was, but I knew he had to have one because Delia was extremely – and I mean extremely – supportive of Mark. Others had tried to woo Delia back. Delia needs to absolutely feel and know that it’s heartfelt.’ Referring to How to Eat, he said ‘I mean she’s a very, very straightforward lady – and brilliant at it – but she didn’t just want it to be another series. It had to have a reason for being.’

Thompson had created a revolution in food and successfully pinned it on Delia. While she had been appearing on the BBC from 1979-1999, the focus in Britain had shifted from cuisine to health. ‘It was about the quality of ingredients, cooking for friends. We were encouraging documentary makers to think about food migrating from arts and other sectors.’ By the time Jane Root took charge of BBC2 in 1999, cooking had moved from the educative model to entertainment, bringing delight along with helpful tips.  ‘Delia was the bridge between these worlds,’ Jane Root told me. ‘Delia was based on the idea that you would create this masterpiece in the kitchen and then take it through to the sitting room and everyone would ooh and aah over it.’

Root insisted that food television had to be about ‘enjoyment rather than working hard at it’. It had to be about delight. ‘It reminds me of many years later working with David Attenborough on Planet Earth. At the time when it started, there were these huge discussions in the BBC and on Discovery and David said ‘you have to fall in love with the world before you can save it’. That was the line that we all followed; fall in love first and that will motivate you to save it.  I think there was that thing about love and pleasure.  It was a kind of breakthrough.’

But the idea may not have happened if the BBC hadn’t commissioned a piece of research which Root remembers as one of the most influential moments on her watch in food TV. The research was not about food itself, but about how people felt about food. ‘We asked people what extra thing they’d like to have in their kitchen. And the answer was a sofa.  For me that was a really breakthrough moment. I remember talking to Peter Bazalgette about it and various production teams.  For me, it was this idea that we had shifted as a culture from food being made in a kitchen completely separate to your family to food being the essence of a social thing. The home cook’s obsession about cooking was making a risotto, drinking a glass of wine with your best friend in the kitchen while people are standing around talking. It was about that level of informality and friendship.’ 

The research would inspire a new way of looking at food at BBC2, which would then spread to Channel 4 and open out new ways of telling stories about food across British TV, and ultimately into the high street. ‘We wanted to make it into something to do with preparation that was more social,’ explained Thompson. ‘I wasn’t so keen on this idea of ‘lifestyle TV’. It never quite captured what I thought was going on,’ he told me.  His own passion for cooking, inspired by his holidays as a schoolboy in Rome, underpinned a developing ideology at the BBC. He wanted to explore the meta-values of food, what it said about the individual cook, his/her world and the way they think; ‘It’s about an attitude to life. Unlocking it was a kind of expressionism. Collectively we took that underlying metaphor to create something new.’ 

Delia was also one of the catalysts behind what would become the Jamie Oliver phenomenon.  Jane Root explained: ‘At that time, Delia was making all these noises about retiring which she continued to do on and off for years. So we were all like ‘please don’t go, Delia’. But we were wondering if she ever did retire, who would we get to have that position. So we were actively looking.’   She and Mark Thompson watched with interest as the independent production companies brought a new flavour to the mix. ‘We were beginning to change the mould with the introduction of indies,’ Thompson told me. ‘We’d made The River Café with Ruth Rogers and Rose Gray. They were really hot in the ‘90s. We needed to think who we were going to get next.’   Channel 4 were in the lead in the ratings race with Nigel Slater’s Real Food (1998) and Nigella Bites (1999), and the cult of the individual making food into lifestyle and the kitchen the leisure zone of the home was finding purchase. Pat Llewellyn spotted her moment and approached Thompson.  He remembered the moment; ‘Pat (Llewellyn) came to me and said ‘you’ve lost the battle but there’s this boy...’’

Next: The Making of Britishness, how - and why - Pat Llewellyn created Two Fat Ladies and found Jamie Oliver, including my original audio interview with Pat Llewellyn.

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