GUILT Y PLEASURES
Like most people, I watched an awful lot of nonsense during lockdown. What else was there to do? Of course, I watched Tiger King on Netflix. Poor old Joe Exotic, he finally got what he wanted and achieved global fame and he’s in prison for 20-odd years. He probably couldn’t even watch it. There’s a lesson in there somewhere, although Donald Trump will probably pardon him.
I actually thought Joe was all right, until it transpired that he drugged his lions and tigers and killed a load of them. Oh, and it didn’t look great when one of his staff had their arm bitten off and all he was bothered about was losing a few quid (the maddest part about that episode was the fact that she didn’t seem at all bothered). At the end of it, I came to the conclusion that Joe didn’t even like big cats that much. As for his arch-nemesis Carole Baskin, she got away with something. I’m not sure what it was, but she’s definitely a wrong ’un. But you know the really strange part about Tiger King? I thought it was going to be even more bonkers than it was, which may or may not be a reflection of where my head was at during the whole coronavirus madness.
One lockdown phenomenon that I didn’t watch was the Michael Jordan documentary The Last Dance, because while Michael Jordan is obviously a legend, basketball is rubbish. I saw a game once in New York and left at half-time, despite having courtside tickets. You know what really annoyed me about it? The sound of the ball bouncing. I have an irrational hatred of balls bouncing. That might sound a bit weird coming from a former cricketer, but the ball doesn’t really bounce in cricket. Well, it does, but you can’t hear it. But if someone is bouncing a ball, whether it’s the kids in the garden or a bunch of NBA players at Madison Square Garden, I can’t handle it. It’s up there with doors banging. Big things, fine. Small things can really set me off. I’ll be sitting there thinking to myself, ‘You really should let this go.’ A few seconds later, I’ll lose it.
Anyway, at this basketball game, it wasn’t just the sound of the ball bouncing that was annoying, it was also the sound of trainers squeaking. And I couldn’t understand why they didn’t just put the ball in the hoop, without all the showing off. For all those reasons, the thought of watching a documentary about basketball filled me with dread. It didn’t matter that everyone was banging on about it, I just couldn’t bring myself to put it on. I think I’ll watch and enjoy it once the hype has died down.
I’m told that a lot of the footage in The Last Dance was shot in the 1990s, long before reality TV took off. At least that meant that there was less playing up to the cameras than you see in fly-on-the-wall documentaries today. It was the same with the famous documentary of the 1997 British and Irish Lions tour of South Africa, Living with Lions. But it doesn’t work any more, because the people in modern fly-on-the-wall documentaries know that they can become ‘inadvertent’ stars. For that reason, I can’t even watch cricket documentaries, because they’re not a true representation of a team. Plus, I always thought that the changing room was sacrosanct. When I was playing for England, the idea of inviting a camera crew in would sometimes crop up but I was always dead against it. I didn’t even like having TV cameras in the changing room after we’d won a Test match, although my lads love The Test.
Gogglebox has gone the same way, in that the people on it now know that they can use it to launch a celebrity career. Saying that, I still love it and watched a lot of it during lockdown. One of my kids was a massive fan of it, they persuaded me to watch an episode and now I’m hooked. A few of them are scripted to within an inch of their lives, but there are some real belters on there, especially that grumpy Mancunian bloke with the dog. When I was in Australia recently, the first series of Aussie Gogglebox was just about to start and they just couldn’t get their heads around it. They kept asking me to explain it to them, I’d tell them that it was people being filmed watching TV and talking about it, and they’d be completely dumbfounded.
What my Australian friends would have made of some of the TV ideas I’ve been pitched down the years is anyone’s guess. What usually happens is I’ll turn up at a meeting and someone will say, with a beaming smile on their face, ‘You’re really going to like this.’ Someone else will start explaining what the programme idea is and after about 20 seconds I’ll say, ‘I’m going to have to stop you there. I don’t like it at all.’ One of the worst ideas pitched to me was ‘celebrity rehab’, which was like something Alan Partridge might have pitched to Tony Hayers, the fictional BBC director of programming. At first, I didn’t know whether they wanted me to appear on the show or host it. And when they told me that they wanted me to host it, I said, ‘Whoa, this is not for me. What is wrong with you?’ They couldn’t really understand why I thought it was a terrible idea, because these producers and TV execs are in a world of their own and always think that every idea they have is of major importance.
Mind you, I’m a bit of a hypocrite, because some programmes I watch are, by most people’s moral standards, absolutely appalling. With Naked Attraction, the basic premise is this: there are six naked people hidden in booths and they gradually reveal themselves from the feet up. After each round, a fully-clothed chooser eliminates one of the naked people, until there are only two left, at which point the chooser also takes their clothes off before choosing who they want to go on a date with (presumably with their clothes on).
Then there are the programmes you watch that make you wonder if you’re supposed to laugh or not. I watch The Undateables, which is a show about people with physical or learning disabilities trying to find a partner, and can’t work out if its heart is in the right place or not. Every time I watch it, me and the same group of friends spend the whole episode texting each other, but it’s difficult to know if I’m finding the right bits funny, or whether I’m supposed to find any of it funny. That’s the same as a lot of things in life now, you’ll see something or someone will say something and you’ll find yourself suppressing the natural inclination to laugh. But I think I watch The Undateables from a good place, because I also find myself getting a bit choked up, especially when someone ends up falling in love on a date.
But it’s amazing how some shows stay alive, because they are so near the knuckle, exploitative and just seem to cause problems all the time. Take Love Island. Four people connected to that show have taken their own lives, which should set alarm bells ringing. Feminist groups have raised concerns over the portrayal of women and their treatment by the blokes on the show, mental-health charities have attacked it for the negative impact it can have on viewers who are insecure about their bodies, and it’s all just a bit tawdry. Personally, I think people should be allowed to watch whatever they want, and if that’s what the contestants want to do, then let them crack on. But I do worry about the messages it sends out and what direction we’re going in as a society.
I completely understand why programmes like Strictly Come Dancing and MasterChef get millions of viewers, because they’re nice. Most people don’t want to watch programmes that pit people against each other and try to appeal to their baser instincts, they want to watch programmes that are a bit fluffy and make them feel good about humanity. That’s also why dramas like Call the Midwife and Death in Paradise get so many viewers, because they’re mostly lovely and completely unremarkable and unchallenging, like televisual weed. No one is going to go to bed angry after watching either of those, even if so many people have died on that Death in Paradise island that the human population must be teetering on the brink of extinction.
I’ve seen the odd episode of The Great British Bake Off, which is about as fluffy as TV programming gets, but it’s not what got me into baking. I’ve always been partial to making cakes, although the opportunities nowadays are few and far between. I’m not one of those people who feels the need to take photographs and share them with people, but I can also make a decent spaghetti Bolognese, chilli con carne or curry. I don’t feel the need to make anything fancy at home, because I don’t even eat anything fancy when I go out.
I’ve gone full circle. I started out with a very basic palate – what you might call a northern palate – before eating out at Heston Blumenthal’s place and lots of other Michelin-starred restaurants when I started earning a few quid, where they bring out loads of little portions and you have to pretend everything is the best thing you’ve ever put in your mouth, and now I’d sooner have a takeaway curry, fish fingers with chips and beans or, if I do go out, a Toby Carvery. I find all that Michelin-starred food a bit ridiculous. Starters made to look like desserts, desserts made to look like savoury food, main courses that don’t fill you up. I don’t think anyone really likes that stuff as much as they say they do. Most of it is down to snobbery and fashion. Look at Greggs, one minute everyone was taking the piss out of them, now everyone’s eating their food and saying how good it is. People really need to start thinking about things a bit more and go back to basics. It’s cheaper and it’s nicer.
I like Japanese food. To a point. It’s fine. I don’t dislike it. But mainly because I’ve been told it’s healthy. But if I was on death row and the governor said to me, ‘The chef can make you two things for your last meal: either a delicate sashimi salad or a massive battered cod with chips and mushy peas. What will it be?’ you know what the answer’s going to be. It’s not really a choice, is it? That’s the ultimate test of how much you really like a certain type of food, whether you’d consider it as a last meal. And let’s be honest, you wouldn’t even think of eating anything that you would find in Nobu. Who asks for sushi on death row? I bet it’s never happened. I’ve read about the last meals they eat in America and it’s all burgers and pizzas and massive tubs of ice cream. And never once a sorbet.
What even is sorbet? Who’s it for? It’s basically shit ice cream. Ice cream with all the fun removed. Don’t get me started on sorbet. My favourite dessert is Viennetta. The noise when the knife breaks the exterior shell, magnificent. Like the start of a miniature avalanche in your bowl. I wasn’t as big a fan of Ice Magic, that chocolate sauce that turned solid after you poured it on your ice cream. That was far too silly. And pointless. The whole point of chocolate sauce is that it looks all lovely and gooey. Why would you want it to go hard? It’s then an inconvenient layer between the spoon and the ice cream, rather than adding to the loveliness. Ice Magic was trying to fix a problem that didn’t exist, which is exactly what Peter Jones would say if someone tried to flog it on Dragons’ Den today. Liquid chocolate is liquid chocolate, that’s what makes it great. Why would you want it to cease being liquid chocolate once you’d squeezed it from the bottle? I don’t understand some people, I really don’t.
When it comes to ice cream itself, I’m very much a giant-tub-of-vanilla-ice-cream man, but only if it’s on offer from the Co-op. I’m not paying £5.99 for a small tub of Ben & Jerry’s cinnamon and gingerbread ice cream. Vanilla ice cream is a strange thing. When I was a kid, that’s pretty much what ice cream was. That or chocolate or strawberry. Then it became a byword for boring, the flavour that was always chosen last in a Neapolitan. Now, everyone is trying to put a spin on it, to make it seem more interesting. Ice cream isn’t just vanilla any more, it’s Madagascan vanilla. No, no, no. I am not having that. I don’t care where they got the vanilla from – Madagascar or Grimsby – or whether the ice cream has got little black dots in it, it’s still just vanilla.
While we’re on the subject, what the hell is gelato? I thought it was just Italian for ice cream until someone put me right. That’s the thing about food, you can be eating it and thinking, ‘Yeah, this is all right, but it’s basically just ice cream’, and someone will pop up and say, ‘Actually, it’s not the same as ice cream. It’s better.’ But if that person hadn’t said anything, I would never have known. And because someone at some point decided gelato sounded a bit fancier than ice cream, that meant they could make it more expensive. Now when someone asks if I want a gelato, I’ll get a bit snappy: ‘No. I don’t. I just want a Mr Whippy. Preferably with a flake in it.’ Or a Magnum, which was an absolute game-changer when it came along in the 1990s.
While the Mr Whippy was co-invented by Maggie Thatcher, Roger Moore played a part in inventing the Magnum. Apparently, he happened to mention to someone at Wall’s that his one wish was for someone to invent a choc ice on a stick. Not an end to famine and war, but a choc ice on a stick. And someone did. The Magnum brought luxury to the world of sticked ice creams, blew the Feast (which promised far more than it delivered), the Funny Foot (nice, but not actually very funny) and the Fab (nowhere near substantial enough) out of the water. I’d even dare to say that the Magnum rivalled the Cornetto for supremacy in the ice-cream van’s freezer.
But whether you ordered a Magnum or a Cornetto, the ice-cream man knew you weren’t messing about. You meant business. When he saw you approaching his van, he knew he wouldn’t have to be scrambling around at the bottom of his freezer for a Screwball, because you had graduated to more sophisticated things. The Magnum and Cornetto were aspirational, the ice-cream equivalents of an Audi Quattro and a Volkswagen Scirocco respectively.
The Cornetto has lots of different flavours, with the nutty one probably the king, but I reckon the Magnum trumped them all with its white chocolate version. Is white chocolate really chocolate? I don’t care if it is or not, I love it. Dark chocolate, not so much. Everyone’s eating the stuff nowadays, and they tell me it’s more sophisticated than other kinds of chocolate, but I wouldn’t let it pass my lips. It’s for people who have allowed advertising people to convince them that it’s somehow more healthy than milk chocolate. But they don’t really enjoy eating it. They can’t, because it’s just so bitter. Like eating raw coffee beans. People might call me simple and unworldly, but I don’t care.
I once put a tweet out about a great meal I had at a Toby Carvery in Macclesfield and people were having a go at me for being unsophisticated. But you can waste a lot of time pretending to like things you don’t really like. As I got older, I started to realise that you’ve only got a certain amount of time left, so you want to spend time doing things you actually like, not what other people say you should like. I’ve been everywhere trying to find a better Sunday roast, but a Toby Carvery is honestly by far the best money can buy.
Toby Carvery does all the meats, all the veg, giant Yorkshire puddings, and you can pay £1.50 extra for an Alan Partridge big plate. I never get four meats (a turkey, beef and lamb medley is my thing, the white turkey meat offsetting the red beef and lamb, for health reasons, while gammon never even enters the equation) but just the fact you can blows my mind. Actually, I’m not being entirely honest, because I will usually double up on turkey, beef or lamb because of the lack of gammon. And when you get a big plate, they chuck in a couple of sausages, as well as an extra Yorkshire.
I don’t know how they do it, but the turkey is never dry, like the stuff you get with a Christmas dinner. It’s always the same on Christmas Day: someone will say, ‘Lovely turkey, not too dry.’ And I’ll be thinking, ‘But it is dry. You’re just saying that to be nice. It’s always dry. Every year.’ But whenever you eat in a Toby Carvery, you just know someone is going to say at some point, ‘This turkey’s very moist. How do they do it?’ And they won’t be lying. They must have access to special turkeys. Maybe it’s not turkey? Or they’re supplied by mutant turkey breeders whose birds live in aircraft hangars. To be honest, I don’t care what it is, it’s beautiful. As for Toby’s special gravy, that makes everything taste good. You could pour it on a lemon sorbet and it would improve it. I’d drink it straight from a mug. In fact, I have. It’s the perfect restorative beverage on a cold winter’s day.
In case anyone was wondering if I was angling for free food from Toby’s, they already give it to me. When I put that aforementioned tweet out, they got in touch and offered me a Toby Carvery gold card, which entitles me to a hundred pounds’ worth of roasts a month. That card is one of the best presents I’ve ever received, along with a Pizza Express card that I had for a while. Although I must admit, it’s a bit tricky sometimes when you’re well known and having free food thrown at you. When it gets to the embarrassing part when I have to pull out this card to get the free food, I take that opportunity to give the waiter a big chunk of what the bill would have been. That seems fair, and it means they look after us better than any waiter at the Ritz. Especially the lovely lad from the Bolton restaurant, who always turns a blind eye to an extra Yorkshire, and Liam from the Macclesfield branch, who knows a few people I know and pulls out all the stops. That man would slip me extra sausages until the cows came home.
I get a bit paranoid sometimes, because I think people in the queue behind me are thinking, ‘Who the hell does he think he is? Just because he scored a few runs and took a few wickets for England once, he gets extra meat.’ And they’re probably getting a bit twitchy, because they’re within touching distance of the food and they’re probably thinking, ‘Flintoff’s gonna clean up here. I just know it. He’s gonna snaffle those last two Yorkshires . . . ’ Although I’m hearing on the street that queuing and helping yourself is a thing of the past since the pandemic. Apparently, you tell them what you want and they get it for you. That worries me: how do they know where to put things on your plate? And how do they know the correct ratio of one food item to the next? You can give them a rough guide, but you’d end up hating yourself: ‘Sorry, no, a few more carrots. One less potato. Hmmm, that gravy has become a bit overwhelming . . . ’ Someone suggested I should bring a magic marker along and draw a diagram of where I want things to sit on the plate. That idea’s got legs.
While we’re on the subject of bringing your own stuff to restaurants, my mum and dad had a gathering at their house to celebrate my grandpa’s eightieth birthday and I turned up with my own wine glass. My mum wasn’t very impressed. She didn’t say anything, but I could tell by the expression on her face: ‘Who is this boy? I’m not sure I know him any more.’ I never did it again.
Obviously, I don’t drink any more, but I was always very particular when it came to glasses. If I was drinking Guinness, I’d have to drink it out of a Guinness glass. They have those grooves down the side to make gripping it easier. If I was drinking Peroni, it would have to be out of a Peroni glass. Stella, the same, even when they introduced the glass with a stem. Occasionally, the beverage–glass combination didn’t work. I was never a fan of the San Miguel glass, always thought it tasted better in a basic pint pot. I recently discovered that even Corona have introduced their own glass. I reckon they thought, ‘Jesus, this pandemic has given us a bad name, we’re going to have to up our game. A segment of lime isn’t going to get us through this.’
But back to Toby Carveries. I think people feel sorry for my wife, as if she’s made to eat at Toby Carveries against her will. But we all love it. There’s one between Bolton and Preston, so we meet my mum and dad there. I’m not sure it’s as good as my mum’s Sunday roast, but it’s better than anything I could do, and why would I even bother trying?
Not only have I drunk gravy straight from a mug, I am also partial to a bowl of mushy peas, unaccompanied. Someone recently told me that the mushy peas they have in fish and chip shops aren’t actually made of peas, but it makes no difference to me. They’re wonderful, whatever they are. And they’re a godsend for owners of fish and chip shops, because they don’t make any money on fish any more because it’s so expensive to buy. Next time you’re in a chippy and you order mushy peas, keep a close eye on the owner’s expression: he’ll be beaming from ear to ear, I guarantee you, because it means he lives to fight another day.
I understand that fish and chip shops can be a bit of a minefield for southerners visiting the north. There’s the story of Peter Mandelson, former Labour MP for Hartlepool, pointing to mushy peas and asking for a helping of guacamole. Then there are scallops. People see the sign and think, ‘60p for a scallop? Very reasonable.’ But when they’re served up, they discover that fish-and-chip scallops are actually fat lumps of fried potato, and nothing to do with scallops that live in the sea.
There was also a documentary series called The Game Changers on Netflix, about the benefits of eating a plant-based diet, so a lot of people are into it now and it clearly works for some of them. But I just really like eating meat. And while I don’t mind vegetables, I don’t want them to be the main part of my meal. And vegans get on my nerves a little bit. Eat what you want, but don’t tell me why you’re eating it. I’m not interested. People who don’t eat meat are similar to non-drinkers. Chances are when you ask non-drinkers what they want to drink, they’ll reply, ‘Oh, I don’t drink, I’ll just have a sparkling water.’ And chances are that when a vegan orders food, they’ll say something along the lines of, ‘I’m having the sun-dried tomato herb salad, because I’m a vegan.’ That’s their little way of letting you know that they’re morally superior to you.
As I always say to my missus whenever she hints that maybe I should eat less meat, I could go on the internet and find hundreds of articles saying veganism isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Whatever you want to believe in life, you’ll find things to back up your arguments on the internet. That’s why the internet as an experiment has backfired, because while it is a fount of all knowledge, a lot of that knowledge isn’t factually correct.