Armchair Nation (53 page)

Television cookery programmes had long provided vivid proof of the power of television to transform daily habits. This was partly a symptom of culinary ignorance: in a country with more cooking expertise passed down through families, like France or Italy, food programmes did not wield so great an influence. In the early postwar years, the TV chef Philip Harben, cooking on a basic enamelled four-ring stove, probably had a greater impact on culinary standards than Elizabeth David, who did not start to be published in Penguin paperback until 1955 and who, well into the 1960s, was mainly a north London middle-class taste. Raymond Postgate, who in 1949 had proposed a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Food and in 1951 published the first
Good Food Guide
, praised Harben as ‘one of the major influences towards good living in this country, and there is no country which needs it more'.
⁴³

In 1953, Harben had shown a still austere Britain how to cook the tail of the Dublin Bay Prawn, which he named ‘scampi'. The next day fishmongers were swamped with orders they could not meet and
soon many kinds of shellfish were being doused in batter and served as scampi in restaurants. Scottish fishing communities welcomed this example of television's mass influence even before they had sight of a TV screen themselves. By the early 1960s, scampi, mostly bound for the Midlands and the south, accounted for a third of the total catch at the fishing port of Ayr on the Firth of Clyde. Then, in 1974, Scottish fishermen blamed Fanny Cradock for a precipitous decline in the demand for prawns after she showed how to make ersatz scampi using monkfish. Cradock had replaced Harben as the BBC's main television chef in the mid 1950s, when he fell foul of the corporation by agreeing to sponsor a frying pan.
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When Peter Bazalgette began producing the programme
Food and Drink
in the early 1980s he noticed that large numbers of viewers were asking for the recipes. He realised that, because TV programmes moved along too quickly for the viewer to write things down, it created an inbuilt demand for information in more tangible form. And so he deployed the BBC's teletext service, Ceefax. Ceefax (‘see facts') had been conceived in a Brompton Road pub in 1969 when BBC engineers met to work out how text could be hidden in the spare lines of the analogue TV signal to provide subtitles for deaf people. But Ceefax's founding editor, Colin McIntyre, saw that it could also be used to provide news and information, and accommodate ‘the viewer who doesn't check his Pools till Tuesday, the man who wants waterways information, or the film fan who wants the details of a cast list'.

In the 1970s, Ceefax had few viewers, because the decoders needed to show it on television sets were expensive. But as Bazalgette took over on
Food and Drink
, Ceefax was just starting to be included as standard on newly bought televisions, and he used it to create another platform for the programme. In 1985, after
Food and Drink
demonstrated an apple corer and put the details on Ceefax, two factories had to be opened in the Far East for British orders. The next year, some of the ingredients for the programme's Oxtail soup recipe had to be shipped from Holland to meet demand.
⁴⁵

Ceefax, which simply involved teams of people typing information on to a screen, looked primitive even in the 1980s. McIntyre
described it as a ‘string and sealing wax operation', ‘printed radio' and a ‘bicycle in the technological age', and it was known in-house as the ‘printed bicycle'.
⁴⁶
But Bazalgette's use of it was a novel form of interaction with viewers, giving his programme a life beyond the broadcast itself.
Food and Drink
went on to pioneer the trend for television programmes to spawn commercial offshoots, such as BBC
Good Food
magazine, launched in 1989, and the BBC Good Food Show at the Birmingham National Exhibition Centre, first held in 1991. The show's centrepiece was the British Gas Celebrity Theatre, where television chefs such as Gary Rhodes and Michael Barry performed, before moving to the book stand to sign copies of their books. A chef might still have got into trouble with the BBC for sponsoring a frying pan. But there were more creative, roundabout ways of selling products and lifestyles to viewers than a straight pitch on the new shopping channels – especially on commercial and satellite television, where a general mood of celebratory consumerism led nicely into the ad breaks.

On 6 December 1990, in an edition of
Delia Smith's Christmas
, Smith showed viewers a recipe for chocolate truffle torte and pointed out that its key ingredient, liquid glucose, was available from chemists. Within days, Boots' West Country warehouse was emptied of its stock and two weeks later there was no liquid glucose to be had throughout Europe. According to an Aberdeen pharmacy, Charles Michie and Sons, Scottish chemists were caught ‘with their breeks down'.
⁴⁷
By the mid 1990s, Smith's ability to empty shelves simply by mentioning types of pie-topping lattice cutter or lemon squeezer was well known, but this still left the country ill-prepared for the great cranberry shortage of 1995. A previously minor berry known mainly for its medicinal qualities (until 1991, cranberry juice was available on NHS prescription to cure cystitis), its status was transformed by Smith's copious use of it in her series
Delia's Winter Collection
, which unhappily coincided with a poor cranberry harvest in America. ‘It is murder,' said one beleaguered importer. ‘We
must
have cranberries.'
⁴⁸

Television's effect on its viewers is endlessly conjectured but, since it takes place in millions of individual living rooms, remains
essentially invisible and immeasurable. The Delia effect, by contrast, seemed to show this effect vividly, giving the workings of mass consumer society a narrative simplicity, a clear sense of cause and effect. Four or five million viewers watched a programme on BBC2 and the next day supermarket shelves emptied. In his 1999 book
Living on Thin Air
, the former New Labour adviser Charles Leadbeater argued that Delia Smith ‘symbolises a vital aspect of the New Economy: the power of knowledge'. Leadbeater saw the boom in cookery books and TV chefs as ‘a worldwide upgrade of the software which runs our kitchens', introducing us to food from around the world in a way that proved that ‘globalisation is good for our palates'. And while a chocolate cake could only be eaten once, he pointed out, the same chocolate cake recipe could be endlessly replicated without anyone being worse off – rather like the new weightless economy which would be driven by the exchange of ideas and information. Leadbeater called it ‘the thin-air business'.
⁴⁹

But there was nothing very ethereal or weightless about the Delia effect. With the relaxation of planning laws in the 1980s, supermarkets had grown in number and power, and the big stores learned to react quickly to trends through just-in-time distribution networks, tracking purchases through loyalty cards and till receipts and even Met Office data, which told them when to stock up on ice cream and salad, or hot water bottles and de-icer.
Delia's Winter Collection
tied in with a book of the same name which included a list of Sainsbury's stores at the back, and Smith's office warned supermarkets in advance to stock up on key ingredients. The publication of this book coincided with the withdrawal of major publishers from the 95-year-old Net Book Agreement, the arrangement by which all books were sold at full price, which had somehow managed to survive into the post-Thatcher era because publishers argued that mark-ups on bestsellers allowed them to subsidise loss makers. The collapse of the agreement allowed the big book chains and supermarkets to offer selected titles at huge discounts, and a new publishing phenomenon was born, the hardback bestseller, usually with a television tie-in. Between 1960 and 1995, Elizabeth David's most successful book,
French Provincial
Cooking
, sold just under 250,000 copies; by the end of 1995,
Delia's Winter Collection
had sold a million.
⁵⁰

Why Smith had such a devastating impact on supermarket shelves compared to other TV chefs is less clear. When she returned to television in 1990 after a decade-long career break writing Catholic devotional books, she retained a certain didacticism, a residue of the old cookery demos that used to be on television and which sat somewhat oddly with the style of the newer, hyperactive TV cooks like Keith Floyd and Gary Rhodes. Unlike them, Smith never ate her own food on camera: even when showing viewers how to eat spaghetti, by curling a single strand round a fork, she refused to lift it to her mouth. Writing in the
Times Literary Supplement
, a Cambridge English don, Eric Griffiths, related her style to Hegel's theory of the aesthetic, in which ‘smell, taste, and touch remain excluded from the enjoyment of art'. In place of sensuous immediacy, Delia had ‘regal self-control', a ‘dowdy reticence' and an ‘over-arching and point-instant grip of time'. ‘Hegel would, on the whole, have approved of Delia Smith,' concluded Griffiths, ‘and settled back after a day of wrestling with the Absolute to watch eagerly what she might think to do next with a cranberry.'
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One of the constants of postwar British cultural history is that each age persuades itself that it is becoming more informal and less elitist than the last. In the late 1990s the sociologist Alan Warde, drawing on the experiences of a thousand diners in London, Bristol and Preston, found that most of them rejected the highly structured, traditional model of the dinner party but quietly improvised on it, so there were still clear but silent rules at work, such as having no more than about eight people, or using cutlery and crockery reserved for such occasions.
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When informality has its own tacit conventions like this, it is easy to imagine Smith playing an anxiety-alleviating role. Her recipes were clear, easy to follow, on-trend but not intimidatingly so and, with her naming of ‘star' ingredients, she steered the average cook through the daunting superfluity of consumer choices.

‘People could hardly go out to dinner with friends,' claims Smith's biographer, ‘without being served up Delia's mixed-leaf Caesar salad,
her chicken basque or the fromage frais cheesecake with strawberry sauce.'
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But how many fromage frais cheesecakes or rillettes of duck with confit of cranberries were actually eaten at 1990s dinner parties remains unknown, because what people do around dinner tables leaves as little trace as what they do in front of their televisions.

‘Our dreamscapes have become domesticated – we now look for fantasy and escape in our back gardens and on our dinner tables,' wrote Andy Medhurst in
Sight and Sound
in 1999. ‘These are programmes where we're invited to prioritise home life, be knowledgeable consumers (but never seriously question the ethics of consumption), temper our daydreams with the acknowledgement that only hard work really delivers, learn just a little from feminism and pretend that only the middle classes exist.'
⁵⁴
Medhurst was writing about a new type of lifestyle television, the makeover show, in which experts did up homes or gardens over a frenetic couple of days and showed them to the surprised and usually (but not always) pleased occupants.

‘I love that
Changing Rooms
. I get loads of ideas from it – I can't wait to get out of here and decorate my own place,' said Tim, an inmate in a Midlands prison who described himself as a ‘Christian heavy metal biker', and who sported a leather jacket over his prison uniform and numerous tattoos and piercings. ‘I definitely want deep red, textured walls … I like Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen. I'd like to
be
Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen. I know he's a bit camp, but I'd model myself on him. He's cultured, he's stylish. Classy without being boring. That's how I want to be.' Llewelyn-Bowen was the
Changing Rooms
designer who, dressed in leather trousers, frock coats and jewel-toned shirts with outsized cuffs, dismissed the Victorian ‘design-o-saurs' who had policed interior decoration and stopped ordinary people from expressing their tastes.
⁵⁵

While he was certainly well known, Llewelyn-Bowen's influence on domestic design was probably minimal compared to the BBC's
DIY expert of the 1950s and 1960s, Barry Bucknell, a home improvement modernist who recommended covering period features such as fireplaces and dust-collecting panelled doors with fibreboard. Bucknell received up to 35,000 letters a week from viewers and employed ten secretaries to sort through it. The eclectic, post-Bucknell ‘retro' styles seen on
Changing Rooms
predated the programme. B&Q, the historian Raphael Samuel noted in 1994, was now full of ‘archaicizing aids' like staircase spindles, damask wallpapers and ceramic tiles.
⁵⁶
Llewelyn-Bowen was most renowned, in fact, for making contestants burst into tears with his garish designs. Favourite
Changing Room
techniques, such as stencilling, the rag-rolling of unsightly walls and the use of MDF (Medium Density Fibreboard) for architectural moulding effects, were employed so often on the programme that it probably hastened their journey into démodé visual clichés.