Down the hatch with Keith Floyd

SUNDAY INDEPENDENT, 5 JULY 1998

I’M NOT MUCH of a cook. Washing dishes, yes – it is soothing, sensual and one of the few activities besides shaving off your moustache that offers you both immediate solitude and the subsequent gratitude of others. In addition – shameful confession – there is something nostalgically comforting about the amniotic warmth of the suds.

But cooking, no. Brinjals and measuring jugs and sliced fingertips are not fit companions, even for a sensitive man of the nineties. Besides which, there is always someone at the dinner table who says: “Oh, it’s so nice to eat some plain cooking for a change.”

So much worse are cooking programmes on television – they’re ordinarily all bright lighting and phoney sets and fussy little kitchen nerds like Graham Kerr with their smug tips about how to keep your mushrooms fresh. Which is why Keith Floyd is so surprisingly welcome a visitor in the Hot Medium household. Few are the middle-aged men who can beetle on to my screen and say, “Hello, we are making the most amazing fish soup,” and expect to be around long enough to enjoy a pre-dinner cocktail.

Floyd’s Fjord Fiesta (M-Net, Fridays, 7pm) – try saying that with a mouthful of martini olives – is Keith’s culinary voyage through the frozen waters and endless afternoons of a Scandinavian summer. He was there to “interpret local cuisine”, but judging by the volume of wine and aquavit he siphoned down, the chief attraction for Keith was that sundowners last all day and all night.

He was having a hard time impressing the locals. We joined him as he lovingly prepared a meal for the officers of his cruise ship, including a special beetroot cream he had invented for the occasion. The first mate scowled at her plate. “This is not in the Norwegian way of preparing beetroot,” she intoned accusingly. The captain just frowned and scraped his teeth with his fork.

Small wonder Keith kept reaching for the brown paper bag, muttering, “It’s time for my mid-morning slurp.” His next stop was an outdoor cooking session at the site of the 1st International Herring Festival. Sadly for the organisers of the fest, it was deserted, save for the intrepid Keith and his assistants (whom, to his credit, he never once called his herring aids).

Spurning the regional delicacy of fermented herring – a dish available from local restaurants only as takeaways – Keith whipped up a kind of finsand-all stir-fry, using whole, gutted herrings. I wish he hadn’t. It was a cruel picture – their horrible wide eyes staring up helplessly from the pan as Keith prodded at them like some infernal Marquis de Sardine.

But enough of the frying puns. Keith was getting desperate. His next cooking location was down the pit in what he gamely admired as “the world’s biggest iron-ore mine”. If the scenery was about as gripping as an Ingmar Bergman movie, Keith himself rose to new heights of alcoholic entertainment. Oh happy moment of television magic when he accidentally reached for a beaker of neat brandy instead of his usual crisp chardonnay.

“Oh my god,” he spluttered, “have you ever done that? Picked up a stranger’s drink and nearly thrown up over the bar?” Worse things will happen if you pick up a stranger’s drink down at the Chalk ’n Cue, Keith.

You can’t help liking Keith Floyd, prickly old cuss though he may be. He marches across the screen extracting such generous yet unabashedly selfish pleasure from the simple indulgences of life that I’m almost tempted to try one of his recipes. Any man who can stand in the midst of the world’s most dour and fleece-lined beach party, surrounded by po-faced herring enthusiasts, sample a raw sea-urchin and say, “Mmmm, good for the sex life” … well, I’ll wash the dishes for him any time.

I wouldn’t even open a packet of paper plates for the makers of The Avenues (SABC3, Mondays, 9pm). A new local drama series, it’s not so much an avenue as a suburban cul-de-sac, littered with bad ideas and crumpled scraps of dialogue that were rejected by SABC1 continuity announcers for being too facile.

The only reasonable explanation for the unutterable direness of the writing is that it is scripted and directed by someone born entirely without ears. No one who has ever heard people speak could possibly force an actor to say those lines. It would be too wantonly cruel. A man scolds his children in an annoyed tone of voice – is this enough to let us know that they have annoyed him? Oh no. We have to hear the echoing voice-over. “These children will drive me to distraction.”

The man and his wife are arguing at breakfast. He criticises her family. “My family are good, solid people,” she replies, with all the verve and authenticity of a papier-mâché grapefruit, “and good, solid people are what you need for a dynamic society.”

A good, solid colonic irrigation is what you need after digesting this script. Mind you, the direction did provide one viewing highlight. Whenever two people are talking, the camera swings laboriously from one to the other and back again, as though the filmmaker were a handicam-toting Japanese tourist taking in the sights at Sun City. On one occasion – ever to be treasured – the camera swung from man to woman and back again, but found only a blank expanse of wallpaper where the man had been. The actor, caught up in the drama of the moment, had taken an unscripted step backwards.

Why are local English productions so accursedly poor? They descend on us like one of the plagues of Moses, like the sufferings visited upon Job, like the wrath of Olympian gods for the hubris of the early Greeks. What have we done to deserve such stern treatment? It makes me long for a Nordic beach party and a glass of chilled aquavit with a frozen herring for a swizzle stick.