Читать книгу Shooting the Cook - David Pritchard - Страница 6

David read the first chapter of his memoirs to us in the film crew van while we were waiting for a tiny rusty ferry to take us from Haiphong to Cat Ba Island, one of the 367 islands of the Cat Ba Archipelago in Ha Long Bay, Vietnam. It took about five boats to get us there, a voyage of a mile or so to one island then a short drive to an even smaller boat on the other side of the island. We had plenty of time to listen. There was nothing else to do, certainly nothing to buy, only purple, green, or orange soft drinks on sale in dusty bottles at the kiosks on the slipways. We were all laughing so much after the first couple of pages anyway. He really wasn’t being self-effacing. His early days in TV were chaotic and his first cookery series with Keith Floyd happened only because he loved food, liked going to Floyd’s restaurant in Bristol, put him on a local arts meets rock TV programme called RPM, and thought it would be fun to make a cookery series using the Stranglers’ ‘Peaches’ as the soundtrack.

Why ‘Peaches’, I don’t know, but it worked. There had been nothing like Floyd on Fish before, it was as if rock ‘n’ roll had met cookery. The truth is that David has remained the same ever since; he does what seems fun to him at the time and pursues it single-mindedly. Sometimes this can be a little disconcerting. He thinks it’s funny that I am the clumsiest person on the planet and will go to enormous ends to film incidents of me tripping, banging, burning myself with hot fat, or cutting myself. Once when I sliced myself rather badly on a Japanese mandolin while making Taste of the Sea, he accused the cameraman, Julian Clinkard, of having no journalistic sense. Julian had stopped his camera as I was jumping up and down bleeding and swearing. David fumed that he could see it all coming and was just waiting to catch it on film. He calls me the ‘talent’ and says he’s a ‘mere technician’, but I often feel that I’m just the material. However, a few years after the mandolin incident I was leaning over the stern of a massive trawler off the Scottish coast, doodling away on my long defunct Psion organizer, when suddenly he grabbed me and pulled me back over the deck as a ton net weight swung right through where my head had been seconds before. Maybe he does care after all.

The truth about David is that because he knows what he wants and has an uncanny ability to gauge what our audience wants too, working with him, though massively annoying at times, when he’s overpoweringly in charge, is exhilarating because I always think we’re onto something new. There is something reassuring about just letting things evolve when we are filming. Sure we have a schedule, but he takes delight in changing it all at the last minute because something, maybe a stall selling dried fish by the road we’ve just passed, has excited him. In a world where TV seems to have become more and more formulaic it’s nice to have someone around with an eye for passing life. I’m not his best friend, Bernard is, but I’m very glad I’m his second best one.

Rick Stein

April 2009