Which television chef would you most like to see throttled in a restaurant? I have to say, Nigella Lawson would be well down the list for me, as I’ve always rather liked her. It’s true that some of her recipes are a little precious, especially all that fairy cake stuff, but surely not to the point that one would wish to strangle her, or witness her being strangled?
Gregg Wallace, perhaps? He’s the one from Masterchef who looks like a badly boiled egg which is permanently on the cusp of ejaculation. Obviously Gordon Ramsay — that’s a given, as they say — but I’d also like to make a case for Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, who once served guests a pate made of placenta. Hugh is another one of those old Etonians who expects working people to go out and forage for their suppers and tells us all, in between munching placenta, how responsible we have to be about what we eat, for the good of the planet and so on. All very well to say if you have a freezer-room full of heavily pregnant women from whom you might procure some afterbirth to whip up a quick starter, not so easy for the rest of us, mate.
And there’s Anthony Worrall -Thompson, another former public schoolboy with a penchant for foraging — in Anthony’s case, from his local branch of Tesco when the staff are looking the other way. You would have to bend down a long way, mind, to throttle Anthony, and you might end up with a bad back as a consequence. I suppose you could first pick him up with a ventouse, once Hugh has finished with it, or maybe tongs, and then throttle him. So there’s quite a queue forming for the al fresco throttling, and we haven’t even dealt with Heston Blumenthal yet.
I am not absolutely certain why I have an animus against TV chefs, aside from the fact that somehow they have convinced the British public that cooking is difficult and even an ‘art’. This has led to two thirds of the population not cooking at all, out of fear, and the remaining third turned into know-it-all show-offs who are forever foisting their absurd and unpleasant creations upon dinner guests who, if truth be told, would really just like a better crack at the wine. It is the reason why when you go to someone’s house for dinner these days you have to wait until 11 o’clock for the food to arrive because the man of the house — it is always the man of the house — is cooking his second meal of the year and hasn’t quite worked out how to get the foraged seaweed out of the nitrogen cylinder without losing his left arm in the process. Spare us. Incidentally, if you can’t cook terribly well and are worried about dinner parties and the like, then let me point you in the direction of three cookery writers who will explain everything you need to know: in chronological order, Elizabeth David, Delia Smith and Felicity Cloake. All women, and none of them show-offs.
I suppose even now the people who run domestic abuse charities and pressure groups will be ringing the Daily Mail to complain that I have perhaps missed the crucial point about the business with Nigella Lawson and her husband Charles Saatchi — which is really about spousal abuse and is something which is never justified, not in the case of TV chefs, and not even in the case of weather forecasters. No indeed: let’s agree upon that, and agree further with the prurient and gleeful sanctimony which you will read in every comment on the incident, on the message boards and the comments sections beneath what counts, today, as a front-page lead story. Throttling people, like eating people, is wrong, and we should condemn un-equivocally all throttlers.
Some people have wondered why it was that nobody attempted to intervene in this ugly marital dispute, which went on for some considerable time apparently. The answer to this is modernity in action: people were too busy filming the argument on their mobile phones to lend a hand, to wander over to the table and say: ‘Oi Saatchi, you slag, leave it aht, or I’ll pickle you in formaldehyde like that shark you’ve got.’ Every-thing, these days, is filmed by imbeciles with mobile phones, later to be downloaded onto YouTube or flogged to the papers for a few hundred quid. As concerned citizens we worry ourselves stupid about the intrusion into our lives of the security services, the extent to which they spy on us all — and yet we have no qualms about the fact that our fellow citizens are pointing their iPhones at us almost every moment of the day and night, in the hope that there’s something embarrassing or incriminating to be shoved on the net.
Her Majesty the Queen was apparently discomfited by this very phenomenon when she turned up to visit the BBC recently — and was greeted by an ocean of gently waving iPhones and BlackBerries held aloft and pointed in her direction, a sort of epitome of modern-day rudeness. I’ve been to football matches where people who’ve presumably paid hard-earned cash for a ticket spend the entire 90 minutes viewing the match through a one-inch square box. But hell, I suppose this isn’t the main point about the Nigella-Charles business either, and now I’m out of space to get to grips with the very real issues which, truthfully, affect all of us.
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