Telly Talk: Food Glorious Food
Tuck in!
I love showing off Brighton. Whenever any friends come in from out of town I dazzle them with the Lanes, skip them down to the beach to marvel at the sea, and parade them from pub to Pavilion and then on again at the wonders that are hidden in every corner of my home. So when I saw that Food Glorious Food had come to Brighton on one of the sunniest days last Summer to plunder our culinary homecooked creativity, to say that my interest was piqued might be an understatement.
Coming across like a mix of The Great British Bake Off and Antiques Roadshow, the judges – that’s Loyd Grossman, Tom Parker Bowles, Stacie Stewart and Anne Harrison – peer and narrate their tasting experience from first visual impression to last tangy aftertaste. Tom says that a lavender taste “is a whisper in your ear, it’s a lover’s kiss”, and I want to offer him a role of manuscript paper to jot down his ode to the blancmange he seems to have fallen in love with.
Anne Harrison has a very different tack, introducing many tasting with the immortal words; “As a WI judge…” As Brenda-the-jam-lady (quite rightly, it seems to me) points out that she was entering this competition and not one at the Women’s Institute, Anne doesn’t seem to compute. Her ‘jolly hockey sticks’ persona is as immovable as the goal posts those sporting batons first aimed for all those years ago, and the WI appears to be almost as shrouded in secrecy and mystery as a Masons lodge. To be fair I probably know more about a Masons’ lodge, but that may be because nobody’s ever tried to stop me finding out about the Women’s Institute.
“Her ‘jolly hockey sticks’ persona is as immovable as the goal posts…”
Elsewhere, of course, Loyd is getting to grips with a certain chicken recipe delivered up by Sharran, the UK’s only female sumo wrestler, and Stacie is being blown away by an array of gluten-free pastries and cupcakes. The thing about this – as Loyd points out before even the first commercial break has had a chance to interject – is that it’s all about the history and the people of Brighton. You know – the decadence, the Regency, the colour, the daring-do. And it’s here. We don’t let ourselves down at all. And we also stick up for ourselves, quite rightly, with dramas burning up and sizzling down, celebrations erupting and sunburn threatening all and sundry.
Of course, this does mean that come Easter Bank Holiday, and then every other bank holiday as the weather warms and the ice creams melt, there are going to be more tourists than ever filling up the shingled beaches and noshing down on our dainty delights. Every shot of the pier, the Pavilion, and of course the sea, made me love Brighton all the more. These camera-people are obviously used to making food look mouth-watering but this time they’ve extended their skills to the landscape too. It really is counting blessings time.
It’s a great competition forming the backbone to this series, offering a huge cash prize and the chance for the winner’s recipe to be stocked on the shelves of Marks & Sparks. Any one of these morsels could have won, but only one goes through to represent Brighton.
However, all of the recipes can be found online. Now, if they could tell me where to get a blancmange tin too I’d be happy as Tom Parker Bowles in lavender.
Food Glorious Food, ITV, Wednesday 20 March 2013
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