Philip Harben

At the dawn of television cookery in Britain in the 1940s was the BBC’s Philip Harben. Given that all the domestic cookery books of previous eras had been written by women advising other women, Harben’s gender alone made his show something of a breakthrough. A bearded, rather gnome-like man who usually appeared in a sensible striped apron, he presented the show in an unfussy and straightforward way. His first series was ingeniously entitled Cookery. The techniques demonstrated were never too demanding, and the format – one person standing behind a counter showing you how to cook each dish – set the tone for a generation to come.

Fanny Cradock

Undoubtedly the first personality chef was the immortal Fanny Cradock, whose name was synonymous for many years with ambitious home cooks who fancied themselves a bit. Cradock, whose distinctly more fragrant real name was Phyllis Primrose-Pechey, had been a food columnist on the Daily Telegraph in the early 1950s, when she was offered a TV show by the BBC. Assisted by her uncomplaining “husband” Johnnie, whom she only actually married after her TV career was over in the mid-1970s, Fanny became the touchstone for a generation that was ready to put the dreariness of post-war rationing behind it.

Her show was primarily about social entertaining. She presented it in full make-up and evening gown, her target audience being aspirational middle-class housewives who wanted to impress. While certainly no feminist, she hated the shrinking-violet tendency that she felt held women back from achieving all that they could, including making a good job of carving a roast bird. If there was a tone of strident bossiness to the presentation – most evident in her barked-out instructions to the wordless Johnnie and her other assistants – it doubtless instilled confidence in many a suburban home-maker who had been given the task of organising dinner for some colleague of her husband’s on a Friday evening.

No matter how intimidating she appeared to be, Fanny Cradock’s shows were wildly popular. Her Christmas special is still regularly shown on UKTV Food, and excerpts of her appearance at the Royal Albert Hall in 1957 are regularly wheeled out on clip shows. What didn’t survive of her in public affection was what came to be seen as her abrasive snobbery. Her now notorious appearance on the BBC’s The Big Time – an early forerunner of Faking It – helped to capsize her career, and storming out of the Parkinson studio when she discovered that the glamorous diva she had been sharing airtime with was actually Danny La Rue ended it for good.

Fanny’s recipes were very much products of their time. Dishes were got up to look like fantasy magazine illustrations, everything was thick with cream, and there was a surprising readiness to resort to chemical food colourings for that all-important touch of the exotic. Mashed potato dyed green adorned a roast chicken, hard-boiled eggs might turn blue, while even the glasses of milk at a children’s tea-party were tinted pink in order to make them more appealing. For all her ready recourse to culinary French, Fanny’s approach to cooking was Anglo-Saxon through and through. As social attitudes changed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, her brand of dangly-earringed Lady Muck superciliousness had begun to grate.

The Galloping Gourmet

There had always been an association in British minds between fine dining and the male art of fancying oneself rotten. It seemed to belong to a sophisticated world where restaurant menus were written in French, and the way to a woman’s heart was to appear to know something about wine (as when Sean Connery in Dr No tells a host offering him a glass of 1955 Dom Pérignon champagne,”I prefer the ’53 myself”).

Graham Kerr was TV cookery’s nearest approach to this tendency. His demonstrations were performed in front of a live audience, and at the end of each show, he would pick out a suitably attractive young woman, lead her on to the set and proceed to feed her whatever creation he had just finished.

This was cooking as showmanship. Dishes were doused in brandy and set alight, and the lip-service that Fanny Cradock paid to the limited budgets of many of her viewers was not in Kerr’s line. The word “gourmet” in the title meant there would certainly be no food colouring, and while Johnnie Cradock lurked in Fanny’s shadow with his glass of wine, the Galloping Gourmet tried to spread a little wine knowledge as he took appreciative sips from a glass that was always on hand.

A serious road accident in 1971 interrupted Kerr’s career and, although he eventually made a TV comeback in the US with low-fat cookery and a Christian message, his British glory days were clearly behind him.

Delia Smith

Undoubtedly the patron saint of all TV chefs up to the dawn of the celebrity age, Delia is nearly everyone’s favourite cook. Her defiantly plain, no-nonsense style of presentation, coupled with the fact that her recipes always work, has ensured that sales of her books are now in the tens of millions. She still espouses the one-woman-behind-a-counter style of presentation, and she has stuck to a vow she made to herself early in her career that she would never be seen eating on camera.

She was much mocked by critics when she took things back to basics in the 1990s with her series How To Cook, which included tips on how to boil water and how to fry an egg nicely. The fact of the matter is that, as Delia has never forgotten, there are millions of viewers out there who are completely at sea with even the most basic culinary procedures, and who could never have imagined that TV might one day deign to help them too.

Among her more proficient devotees, Delia’s pulling power is legendary. If she uses something like star-anise in a recipe, it will be impossible to find any the length and breadth of Britain within days, as her followers have descended on every supermarket in the UK in search of it. Her unsponsored recommendation of a particular cookery implement can alter its manufacturer’s balance-sheet overnight. And Norwich City FC, in which she has a majority shareholding, have cause to thank her not only for helping to rescue the club financially, but for showing that there can be more to football ground catering than meat pies.

Keith Floyd

While Delia concentrated on the basics, men’s cheffing lurched off in an entertaining new direction in the person of Keith Floyd. Floyd was a failing restaurateur turned radio chef whose larger-than-life persona turned out to be box-office gold for the BBC. As well as possessing a natural comic gift, Floyd was an unabashed drinker. It all made for highly engaging TV. These were among the first cookery demonstrations that didn’t feel the need to tell you how much flour to the nearest gram you had to weigh out. If you really wanted to know, you could buy the book or look on Ceefax.

It is quite possible that Floyd unwittingly invented the concept of TV cookery that wasn’t meant to send you eagerly into the kitchen, but was intended instead as an entertainment in itself – all the more so when dishes went quite wrong, as they were occasionally wont to do.

The New Batch

TV cooking in the years since Delia Smith and Keith Floyd began has been dominated by highly acclaimed restaurant chefs making the transition to broadcast media. Among the more prominent have been Gary Rhodes, Rick Stein, Antony Worrall Thompson and Paul Rankin. Like stand-up comics, telly chefs now need an image, even if it’s just a perpetual ear-to-ear grin à la Ainsley Harriott. At the opposite end of the grin spectrum is Gordon Ramsay, whose expletive-strewn rage for perfection has been put to good use rescuing struggling restaurants in the series Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares.

The Two Fat Ladies, Clarissa Dickson-Wright and the late Jennifer Paterson, were famous for stomping on all the expected preciousness of specialist food TV. Paterson was an unrepentant heavy smoker, and drew adverse comment from critics for rubbing pastry mixture together while wearing rings and nail varnish. The Fat Ladies cared nothing for elegance. Nigella Lawson, on the other hand, might be thought to have raised it to a new pitch, with her enormous home kitchen and cult of the “domestic goddess”.

Ruth Rogers and Rose Gray of London’s River Café brought Mediterranean cooking within the compass of viewers whose previous idea of it had stopped at cannelloni. Filming in their restaurant kitchen in the 1990s also accidentally unleashed a painfully young assistant chef by the name of Jamie Oliver into the big time.

The Naked Chef

As much of a byword for TV cooking as Delia these days, Jamie has been awarded the MBE for his work in offering career opportunities to disadvantaged youngsters, and for campaigning via a Channel 4 series, Jamie’s School Dinners, for improvements in the quality of school food.

Despite its cynically attention-grabbing title, Jamie’s first two series for the BBC struck a chord for their refreshingly gimmick-free approach. The camera angles and jump-cut editing might have seemed to be straining for novelty, but the format was basically counter cookery with the added ingredient of a producer off-screen occasionally asking some slow ball of a question. Not only did the programme and its series of spinoff books encourage renewed interest in cooking among young people, in an era when cookery had long since fallen off the school curriculum, it also made it cool for boys to try their hands in the kitchen, an achievement beyond the reach of even the all-powerful Delia.