Shooting the Cook

In the late Seventies and early Eighties there were many programmes about food and cookery on television but they were mostly huddled together on BBC2. Fanny Cradock and her poor downtrodden husband Johnny, along with her young traumatized assistants, were on our screens for years doing mind-boggling things with coloured piped mashed potato. I found it impossible to think of her as a happy fulfilled woman. She looked as if she’d spent the night crying her heart out and had hurriedly and, not too expertly, applied some extra makeup before walking into the studio. I watched her not so much for the culinary tips, but because I liked seeing her berate her monocle-wearing husband for getting in the way.

Then there were the mellifluous tones of the highly respected Derek Cooper introducing the viewers to his world of cooking. Marguerite Patten popped up from time to time. I regard her as the matriarch of all television cooking shows. Madhur Jaffrey hit the gastronomic bull’s eye by teaching us how to make a proper curry using fenugreek and tamarind. Ken Hom did more for the wok-making industry than Chairman Mao and the exotic Robert Carrier taught us about tagines and couscous from his home in Morocco. Glynn Christian, a direct descendant of the famous Fletcher who cut the intolerant Captain Bligh adrift in the South Seas, entertained us for a while before drifting off himself somewhere I know not where. It was a pretty crowded house but through it all Delia’s star got brighter and brighter. And years later, even when she boiled an egg, over three million people tuned in to see it wobbling around in a saucepan of simmering water—hoping, no doubt, it would be as hard as rock when she cracked it open. Like many a male viewer I found her quite sexy, but a bit schoolmarmish (maybe that was the attraction), and her food looked appetizing. Clearly she was someone the viewer could trust, like the sensible girl next door who does shopping for elderly neighbours. Inexplicably I had an overriding sensation that she was standing on casters and being pulled around the television studio on a long piece of string by a member of the production team, and that as soon as she stopped filming she’d crack open a bottle of white, open up the Silk Cut and put on Led Zeppelin.

There were so many cooking programmes in the early Eighties that journalists started to get quite cross about them. ‘Not another one!’ they would cry. ‘Surely enough’s enough?’

But Floyd was different. Until then, cookery on television was really aimed at women. When Floyd came on to our screens he gave men a clear and open invitation to get into the kitchen and have a go for themselves. Forget about exact ingredients, pour yourself a glass of wine and relax. Peel a couple of cloves of garlic and make the whole cooking experience far more enjoyable than going out to a restaurant.

Floyd made it OK for blokes in pubs to have conversations about chillies and coriander, and what’s more, he cut down the fences that surrounded this relatively safe field of TV cookery shows, letting in what was to build up into a stampede of new, strange, and sometimes dangerous animals. Now cookery shows have spilt over from BBC2 onto Channel 4 and ITV where a healthy dollop of testosterone and foul language make them ‘showbiz’. Add to that a smidgen of threatened violence, and it becomes almost gladiatorial. The boundaries are being shifted every few weeks with the likes of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Jamie Oliver highlighting the unsavoury practices of factory farming and alerting the nation to an epidemic of fat schoolchildren. These TV chefs have become more effective and powerful than a roomful of MPs, and I’m talking about a pretty big room here.

I read somewhere that the excellent Anthony Worrall Thompson said that we all got our TV careers because of Floyd. I know that it was Keith Floyd who inspired a very young Jamie Oliver to be a chef. Floyd was right. Cooks have become as famous as racing drivers and rock musicians, probably even more so.

But none of this had happened yet. The programme with Floyd and his very expensive rabbit dish was shown on RPM sandwiched between a Stranglers’ concert and a Sixties guide to the West Country presented by that wonderful writer and broadcaster Ray Gosling; a world of Teddy Boys, street parties, frothy coffee, mini skirts, skiffle and scooters, interspersed with a host of curious and quirky items from the BBC’s treasure trove of old news films. It would be an understatement to say Floyd didn’t fit in terribly well, and many people told me so, including my boss.

‘What on earth has that idiot cooking a rabbit got to do with the programme?’ he asked.

I thought about it for some time, but I couldn’t really come up with an answer. It was nearly a year before I was to meet up with Floyd again.

In the meantime, I went off around Britain with that eccentric Liverpudlian Beryl Bainbridge, following in the footsteps of J. B. Priestley’s English Journey. I learnt a lot from her; not least how to drink large ‘Rusty Nails’, a mixture of whisky and Drambuie.

There was a memorable moment when we arrived in her home town and she led us down a street where the houses were all boarded up, ready for demolition. She looked up at one of them and said, ‘David, that’s where I was brought up.’

We had to film this poignant moment, I thought. So we pulled the corrugated iron off one of the windows and climbed into this scene of devastation. There were daubings on the wall and unmentionable things on the floor; some of the boards had been ripped up to make a fire. I could see she was moved to tears as we walked through the house, through the front room where, she said, her mum and dad used to argue, while she would be upstairs listening. We climbed the stairs, looked into her bedroom, and her eyes were welling up. She lit several cigarettes and stared wistfully out at the backyard, all tumbled down and covered in stinging nettles and overgrown weeds. Eventually we climbed out of the window and she stood there looking back at the house. I found the whole thing terribly moving, and I told her so.

Then she turned to me and said, ‘David, it wasn’t that house. It was the one next door.’

The owl and the pussy cat went to sea—eventually (#ulink_d35e9049-a510-5e1e-b2cd-5c48344ae18b)

From time to time at the BBC you were encouraged to apply for another job. I think it was a measure adopted by large organizations to avoid complacency. Jimmy Dewar, my irascible and generous boss in Bristol, thought it the most sensible thing to do.

‘Look at it this way,’ he said, pouring me a large gin and tonic. ‘You’ll be seen as someone who wants to get on in life and to develop other skills. And, anyway, there are quite a few applicants for the Plymouth job so the chances are that you won’t get it.’

‘What if I do get it and say I’ve had a change of heart?’ He gave me one of those looks that Captain Mainwaring usually reserves for Private Pike.

It was a bit of a shock leaving Bristol to move to Plymouth and take up my new job as features editor there. I remember Alan Clark, the diarist and MP, saying the best view of Plymouth was in the rear-view mirror of his Porsche as he went hell for leather back home to Kent. The centre of the city is improving now and promises to be a mini version of Barcelona in five years’ time—both cities have the sea in common—but back in the early Eighties it was depressing. The city centre, apart from a couple of large department stores, was a pedestrianized zone of cheap low-rise buildings, the result during the last war of the Luftwaffe bombing every structure that had some architectural merit. While it had been uplifting to spend a lunch hour in Bristol, walking down the lovely Park Street, here all I saw were swathes of people dawdling along the pavements, dressed in track-suits and munching on Cornish pasties from paper bags.

The best bit of Plymouth by far was the Barbican, and the best bit of the Barbican was the fish market, right next to the old harbour where the Mayflower sailed to the New World. Plymouth has a new, much smarter fish market these days, where members of the public are not particularly welcome, which is an enormous pity, but in the early Eighties Brussels and all its Health and Safety brigades hadn’t put Plymouth on its list of things to do. Most of the fish merchants had cigarettes stuck in the corners of their mouths as they slid their filleting knives swiftly over the framework of bones.

Hogarth and his sketchbook wouldn’t have looked too out of place in the old fish market. I’d very often see a man inspecting the fish, dressed like Sir Francis Drake in doublet and hose, with a well-trimmed beard and a natty little hat. He looked quite at home among the glistening cobblestones. Apparently he would take groups of schoolchildren around the narrow streets that led down to the harbour and he’d bring to life those days of the Armada, pox, and rum. Occasionally I’d see him in Sainsbury’s with his flashy rings and buckles and a large cutlass swinging from his hip. It was an odd sight to see such a figure reading the small print on a pot of yoghurt.

I loved that fish market, awash with water and ice and disdainful looking seagulls strutting around the fish boxes looking for a tasty morsel. In the winter I ’d buy the finest lemon soles for supper. They were firm and thick and landed just a few hours before and they smelt sweetly of the sea itself. In the summer I’d buy turbot and red mullet and it was on one of those fish-buying trips that the proverbial light bulb went on and completely changed my life for ever.

The fish merchants were true artists of the knife, leaving not a scintilla of wasted flesh behind as they filleted their fish; but they tended to be grumpy until they got to know you. One day when I was shopping there, Fred Brimmacombe, a fish merchant who wore a sailor’s hat with so many badges on it you could hardly see the cloth, was having a bit of a rant.

‘All people in this country want is cod, plaice and ’addock.’ He started to point with his razor-sharp filleting knife. ‘All these red mullet, all these cuttlefish, these ’ere gurnards, is all shipped over to Spain.’ Fred was getting a bit cross now, walking across the slippery fish boxes, balancing on their edges like an angry seal. ‘The mentality over ’ere is, if we don’t bloody well know what these fish are, we don’t bloody eat ’em. It’s a bloody shame. It breaks my ’eart it does, to see all this good fish sent over there to arrive three or four days later in some bloody Spanish port, way past its prime. It’s a national disgrace it is. It really bloody is.’

What an interesting subject, I thought. Here we had all these lovely fish arriving as fresh as daisies and we were selling them to the Spanish and also the French because we didn’t fancy eating them ourselves. Could it be that as an island we were a bunch of fish haters because in days past fish was just too plentiful? I could remember when I came home from school and the house used to stink of fish because my mother boiled cod shoulders for the cat’s tea. It put me off fish for years.

But thanks to Fred Brimmacombe, I knew what my new programme was going to be about. It was going to be an evangelical food programme led by my very own Billy Graham, the man I’d met many months earlier in a Bristol restaurant. I could see Keith Floyd as the fishermen’s champion, showing the people at home how silly it was to export all this fresh, cheap fish to the Continent when we should be eating it ourselves. And this wouldn’t be a five-minute flash in the pan wedged between a rock band and a film on the architecture of Swindon. This would be a whole programme devoted to this dreadful waste of a precious resource. It might even be a series.

Maybe I should nip up to Bristol now to see Keith for a drink and start making plans, I thought. But the turbot looked far too good. I imagined it gently poached in a court bouillon for fifteen minutes or so and then served with hollandaise, new potatoes, and watercress. Maybe I’d see him tomorrow.

When we met again Floyd had lost a bit of his sparkle. He was in the kitchen of his bistro on the phone and having a difficult time judging by the way he was dragging on his cigarette. I gathered from the bits of conversation I was trying not to hear that he was immersed in financial difficulties, and from what I could glean, the person on the other end of the phone was refusing to deliver any more produce until the bill was settled. It was a painful telephone call which had gone well beyond that old familiar stopgap of ‘a cheque is in the post’. I wished I had arrived a bit later because he looked completely dejected as he put the receiver down, and not at all like the swaggering adjutant I’d seen all those months before.

He was in the middle of cooking freshwater crayfish and I’d never set eyes on one before. What beautifully designed things they were, rather like cherry-red Matchbox edition toy lobsters crossed with JCBs. They were being extremely aggressive to each other and I could imagine that if they were the size of dachshunds they’d take over the world. I discovered over lunch they also tasted wonderful, like sweet nutty shrimps. Floyd didn’t eat very much. He was drinking large Scotches with lots of ice and puffing away on endless cigarettes, detailing his thoughts on why the British people have no respect for good food, while the French revere it.

I toyed with the idea of contradicting him by pointing to the hillock of discarded crayfish shells on my plate, compared to his rather full ashtray, but thought it best not to. It dawned on me at the time that one of the differences between a gourmand and a gourmet might well be this: a gourmet is someone with a relatively small appetite and an academic interest in food, who’d rather talk about it than eat it; a gourmand relishes the infinite joys and pleasures of eating.

During lunch we discussed filming, money, locations, dishes. In fact, the money was a bit of a sticking point because everyone at that time assumed television had money to burn, after all it was seen as a glamorous industry. But regional television, along with local radio, was the church mouse of the BBC and the budgets reflected that. Two thousand pounds was all I had to make each half-hour programme of Floyd on Fish, a programme destined to be shown in the south-west only. This meagre budget had to pay for Keith, the film crew, travel and accommodation, film stock and hospitality, which inevitably included many bottles of wine. My salary and the post production costs like editing and dubbing were excluded from that sum. This was 1984. To make a similar programme today you’d have to multiply that figure by twenty-five at least.

Am I supposed to rehearse this? And do I need more than one fish? (#ulink_f45f2ba5-3a47-5782-8b2d-dcb8ddef467e)

I used to have a recurring nightmare while learning the rudiments of rugby at school. I found the rules of rugby union extremely complicated, especially things like the offside regulation, and the fact that you had to pass the ball backwards to your teammates seemed totally unnatural. It seemed to me the game would be so much more interesting if you were allowed to throw the ball forwards. And as for scrums; what on earth was that all about? In my nightmare I would find myself playing for the England Colts at Twickenham, with the stands packed with young enthusiasts. I’d be fortunate enough to catch a high pass but would find myself stopping for a few moments to decide what to do. Should I run with the ball? Should I pass it back or kick it forward? In the meantime a whole mountain of flesh from the opposing side would fall on me and afterwards the scorn of the crowd and fellow members of my team would sound like 10,000 baying wolves. ‘Look,’ I would say, standing alone on the pitch, ‘this is very complicated. I was just trying to decide what was the best thing to do.’ Such was my quandary now.

Our very first location was at a fine restaurant in Devon called the Horn of Plenty and it was run by Sonia Stevenson, a lively woman with a cut-glass accent and a deep passion for food. She said she first wanted to be a cook when she started to make mud pies with her friends as a child. An assistant producer at Plymouth, Jeremy Mills, suggested we shoot there because of her formidable reputation as a cook.

Floyd and I drove through the high hedgerows of Devon to the restaurant. Bluebells, red campions and primroses lined the way as we crunched over the gravel that led to the entrance of this imposing Victorian house. Sonia was waiting on the front steps dressed in her chef ’s whites and looking very professional. Warming to the theme of our programme, she said she had chosen to cook hake in a lemon and butter sauce because the Spanish were nicking all these lovely fish from around our coasts and she wanted to show people how good they were. Splendid, said Floyd, rubbing his hands together.

We started to film and suddenly I realized why, until now, all those cookery shows had been recorded in a studio. With four cameras or so you can have a whole assortment of shots, from close-ups of the ingredients to a wide angle of the kitchen, as well as mid-shots of the cook and guest. But where was my one camera supposed to be looking? At Floyd’s face? At his hands? In the cooking pot? Where? The film was rolling through and I kept it on a shot wide enough to see Keith and Sonia plus the fish and the other ingredients. I think I had a touch of ‘rabbit in the headlights’ syndrome.

Apart from making a very short item with Floyd cooking his rabbit dish, I’d never done anything like this before. Fortunately I was saved by the cameraman, Malcolm Baldwin, suggesting that it would be quite a good idea to cut at this point and set up a closer shot of the subject, which was the fish. ‘Ah! I get it,’ I thought, as Sonia started to cut the hake into cutlets—but what happens next? It was a bit like a jigsaw puzzle, except you had to saw out the pieces personally before you began.

Day one of a new series, and technically I wasn’t up to it: it was a pretty cathartic moment for me. I could tell by the way Floyd was looking at me that he knew I’d lost the plot. I could feel the respect levels plummeting and I thought to myself, ‘I wish I hadn’t done this. I wish I hadn’t done this.’ A director has to be in charge, or everything spirals out of control.

I learnt a set of valuable lessons that day and they are: do a thorough ‘recce’ of the location; discuss in detail the actual cooking process, something you should be able to commit to memory; and make sure there’s another stand-in fish and duplicate ingredients so that you can film all the close-ups of the cooking process in beautiful back-lit photography later on. Also, if the camera is stuck on a tripod, there is very little it can do, whereas if it is handheld it becomes the viewer’s eager eye. I just wish someone had told me before. It would have saved so much pain and angst.

Old dogs can learn new tricks (#ulink_aea95b43-b72a-51c0-8865-847fcca1317c)

Very early in morning after filming at The Horn of Plenty, Keith, me and the crew were on a trawler heading out of Plymouth Sound on our way to the fishing grounds about twenty miles out. I’ve been on many trawlers since and regardless of nationality and age they all seem to smell the same: cigarette smoke, diesel, and a whiff of last week’s fish. There was one more important lesson I had learnt by the end of yesterday’s filming, and that was: as the programme was called Floyd on Fish, it should be Keith doing the cooking, not anyone else, because that’s what I hired him for in the first place. So after filming with Sonia we had visited The Navy, a pub on Plymouth’s Barbican, and held a council of war.

‘When they bring up the net,’ I said to Keith, ‘why don’t you select a lovely fish and cook it on-board for the trawler crew?’ There was a long silence as people thought it over.

‘Let’s get this right,’ said Floyd, pulling on his cigarette. ‘You want me to cook on a trawler. We don’t even know if it has a galley to cook in, let alone any implements.’

That’s true, I thought, but surely they all have galleys because sometimes they’re out there for days, if not a week at a time, and their sandwiches would get mighty stale and curly if they didn’t.

After a while, rather like the doctor in a cowboy film instructing the gunslinger who has to help him deliver a baby in the wilds of Arizona, Floyd said, ‘OK! I’ll need some cream, a skillet, a sharp knife, a spatula, butter, cider, parsley and chives, and you’d better bring a camping stove just in case.’

Now, out in the English Channel on a trawler swaying from side to side in a force-five wind, we waited patiently before we heard the clank of chains and the whine of the winch which signalled the net was about to come aboard. Suddenly, from nowhere, there were dozens of seagulls screeching overhead. This was a really exciting moment because no one knew what the net would contain. It took an age to bring it in and then it was hoisted on a jib above the deck like a giant haggis, swaying and spraying water and smelling of the very essence of the sea. The skipper gave the order to release the cod end—that’s the knot at the bottom of the net—and out spilt a bizarre collection of fish, seaweed, rocks, lots of mud and bits of old motorbikes. Then a hose was turned onto this muddy heap and you could start to see the beautiful fish shining like jewels: hake, scallop shells, a couple of ling, whiting, and pollack and there, in the middle, as ugly as sin, a monkfish.

In the tiny galley barely big enough for two people Floyd was on top form, cooking his monkfish the way they do in Normandy. It didn’t take very long and in a way he began to take over the directing of the scene himself by suggesting to the camera that it would be jolly nice to see the cream go in on a close-up shot so that people could watch it amalgamate with the cider. I couldn’t help notice the faces of the skipper and deckhand as they peered through the window at him from the wheelhouse; they must have thought we were all barking mad. I had to keep my eyes firmly on the horizon, desperately fighting a losing battle against the relentless tide of nausea sweeping over me, as Floyd served the fish up on a plate that had seen better days, and with a couple of forks he found in a drawer, offered it up to the crew to try. It looked good, as good as if it had been prepared in a restaurant in Honfleur. The fish was firm and white and the cider sauce was a velvety pale gold, flecked with green from the herbs. After sampling a mouthful, the fishermen said they liked it, but being fishermen they didn’t enthuse too much. Curiously, it was the first time either of them had tasted monkfish. I had the distinct feeling they would have much preferred a bacon sandwich.

The next day we found ourselves filming in Newlyn fish market. Markets are a joy to film in, because as a general rule fishermen and fish merchants don’t give a tinker’s cuss about being filmed and just get on with the business of making money. There’s a lot of noise and bustle and men with beards and beer bellies who do, however, have a slightly menacing attitude towards incomers. Making a living from the sea is a hard life and if you don’t belong to the fraternity then you don’t really belong here. I think we all sensed this while we were nursing our hangovers and desperately trying to avoid being run over by forklift trucks.

I don’t think it helped that Floyd was wearing a very expensive Burberry trench coat and a brown trilby hat. He looked as if he’d be more at home at Goodwood or Newmarket. We filmed Keith wandering around the boxes of fish, stopping occasionally to pick up a good specimen and put it down, and oddly I noticed that wherever he went he left a trail of fishermen in his wake doubled up with laughter. I knew he was charismatic, but this was extraordinary. These men were normally dour and suspicious, but here they were laughing at whatever Keith was saying (which I couldn’t hear because I didn’t have headphones on). Then I realized what had caused such mirth. Someone had stuck a label on the back of his expensive raincoat saying ‘fresh prick’.

I could hardly breathe for laughing so much but Floyd really didn’t find it funny at all. In fact, he looked quite hurt. When I’d finally stopped laughing I suggested that Keith should tell the audience what kind of unusual fish there were in the market that morning, preferably fish the merchants couldn’t sell in England and were shipping off to Spain and France instead. I should have known that Keith hates to be made a fool of and will always try to get his own back in any way he can.

Once the camera was rolling he picked up a red mullet and said what wonderful fish these were; in France they were highly revered and they called them the woodcock of the sea, because like woodcock, they were cooked with their guts intact. He then went on to talk about other fish that we as a nation ignore, preferring the safer options of cod, plaice, and haddock. Finally he took a fish I’d never seen before. It was a handsome browny-green fish with a spiky, lethal-looking dorsal fin.