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Tuesday 2 December 2008

Making history

Rivers of Blood (BBC2); Delia (BBC2); The Most Annoying Pop Moments ...  We Hate To Love (BBC3) 

During the Wolverhampton speech he said, ‘I can already hear the chorus of execration!’ You sensed that the execration was part of the game plan. History is rarely made by the diffident, and Powell always wanted to make history.

This was a judicious and balanced documentary, and in a curious way elegiac, reminiscent of a simpler time. Though Powell said beforehand that his speech would cause a sensation, only fragments of it still exist on film. Now it would appear in full, in colour, on endless television news loops. It would be inescapable; in those days political speeches were half-heard, half-seen, glimpsed in flickering black-and-white extracts, so that the phrase ‘rivers of blood’ is all most of us can remember. And Powell was wrong; when the riots he had predicted came, in Toxteth, Brixton and the West End, they were multiracial affairs, black and white youths together throwing stones and petrol bombs against a Conservative government.

One year after Powell’s speech, Delia Smith first appeared on television. Now she is back in a programme called, simply, Delia (BBC2, Monday), as in the dinner guest’s appreciative question, ‘Is this a Delia?’ She looked, 39 years ago, a little like Mary Quant — older now, but still spry. It was less a food show than a tribute to a grand old lady. We had Delia talking about her early days, how she met her husband, and rather a lot about her football club, Norwich. (They were brave enough to include her famous on-pitch rant against silent supporters — ‘Lezzby ’avin’ you!’) The recipes were almost an afterthought.

Allegedly, she was teaching us how to cheat by using prepackaged food, though her simple recipes seemed on the complicated side to me. The fish pie included hot-smoked salmon, pre-peeled quail’s eggs, bottled cheese sauce, dill, a tub of crème fraîche, grated cheddar, parmesan, cayenne paper and several bricks of frozen mashed potato. I’m afraid it wasn’t all that appealing. Dinner guests might find themselves saying, ‘I hope this isn’t a Delia!’ But it doesn’t matter; she is the Queen Mum of television cookery and so beyond criticism.

More articles from: Simon Hoggart | this section

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