When Food TV was Good
In a year when it has been all but impossible to dine out, let alone head abroad and experience new cuisines, I’ve increasingly found solace in the wealth of food television now available on the many, many streaming platforms that I’m yet to cancel (despite being several years past the month-long free trial on all of them). There is, of course, an element of escapism in many of the programmes I find myself watching, particularly when it comes to shows that are essentially travel documentaries with a foodie core.
Last summer I raced through (for the third, possibly fourth time) the entirety of Anthony Bourdain’s first series A Cook’s Tour which was originally aired over 20 years ago. The natural progression from there was to begin working chronologically through each of his follow-up series that came to a tragic, early end with his death in 2018. This is a substantial body of work - Bourdain spent around 200 days a year travelling or filming - but even so, I am rationing myself to a couple of episodes a week, knowing that once the credits roll on the final episode of Parts Unknown, there really won’t be any more.
Secondary to the sheer enjoyment of watching footage from places we cannot currently travel to, is watching the gradual evolution of Bourdain’s on-screen persona and the extent to which he grows into the role that he defined for himself. The shy, awkward and slightly gawky journeyman chef - who, much to his own amazement found himself fronting a food leaning travel show - morphs into a confident, learned and interested traveller, one who understands that being in another country, and eating another culture’s food, not only necessitates a level of respect, but also offers endless opportunities to explore issues far bigger than the ingredients in a recipe.
I’ve been struck too, by the significant changes that have taken place in UK-based food television over the last 20 years, or more. A few weeks ago, my wife and I began trawling through the archives on Channel 4’s on demand service and started watching Real Food, Nigel Slater’s first series from 1998. Although, some of the cooking hasn’t quite stood the test of time (his recipe for Thai green curry, for example, looks as if it was mistranslated from a copy of a fax of a telegram), there is a wonderful integrity and honesty to most of the recipes. The series appears to have been filmed with minimal rehearsal in an actual home kitchen, as opposed to a finely-tuned studio dressed to look like an aspirational cooking space. What’s more there are a number of recurring guest chefs including Rowley Leigh, Alistair Little, Nigella Lawson and Peter Gordon, each of whom are a joy to watch (I particularly enjoyed the gentle jostling between Leigh and Little).
Most enjoyable, though, has been the discovery of another Channel 4 offering from the same year as Slater’s debut: The Italian Kitchen presented by Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers, of River Cafe fame. At the heart of the show is a simple premise: the two presenters care deeply about food and know more about how to make it taste good than the viewer. The recipes are timeless and each half hour show is an education into one small aspect of Italian cuisine. It is a programme about how to cook better rather than a programme about creating a polished version of an unobtainable fiction, a narrative much contemporary food television insists on peddling. It is food television in the purest sense and not lifestyle programming hidden inside a food-themed wrapper. It is as wholesome and warming as a bowl of Tuscan ribollita and, as has been necessary during this longest of winters, offers glimpses of the warmth and joys that are, we all hope, just around the corner.
Originally published in Cambridge Edition Magazine’s May issue, available to read here