February 26 marks the anniversary of the birth of one of the most mocked, divisive and despised British celebrity cooks, Fanny Cradock. An extraordinarily unlikable creature who was the face and voice of TV cuisine from the mid-50s to the mid-70s, the witchy wonder was memorably described by one newspaper as “a preposterous character, the foodie you loved to loathe.”
We haven’t done one of these for a while.
Born Phyllis Nan Sortain Pechey in 1909, five minutes from fellow Leytonstoner Alfred Hitchcock, Cradock was the daughter of notable writer Archibald Pechey. Look him up, because he was a famous writer in the 1920s and beyond who, in addition to the songs and novels, ran up such considerable debts in Nice, from where I write this, that he forced Fanny and family to move around Britain numerous times in an attempt to escape his debtors.
In the post-war period, the formidable Fanny built her brand on her putative brilliance in the kitchen. A Francophile par excellence, the pretentious old bat also played up her superciliousness, mistreating her colleagues and patronising the viewers, the ‘great’ British public, whom she regarded as, gastronomic philistines, not entirely unfairly it has to be said.
Fanny also got off on allegedly unwitting innuendo, hectoring her ‘husband’ Johnnie, whose famed phrase “May all your doughnuts turn out like Fanny’s” still brings a tingle to the tastebuds, despite being somewhat apocryphal. What is incontrovertible is that the Cradocks only wed, bigamously at that, after her telly career was brought to a halt by overbearing rudeness towards a housewife cook called Gwen Troake on Esther Rantzen’s The Big Time in 1976. That this kindly farmer’s wife looked a bit like the Queen if she’d been born lower middle class meant the public sided with the amateur, and the cooking crone’s days on the box were over.
Alas, a year after Fanny took her last gasp, the comedian Caroline Aherne gave the great she-devil a memorable namecheck on the Christmas 1995 edition of The Mrs Merton Show, which aired on the Manchester actress’ own 32nd birthday.
In character as the titular tea-drinking host of the mock BBC chat show, the fictional grey-haired granny employed her trademark acerbic charm on a quintet of guests that included Labour MEP Glenys Kinnock (titillatingly topical line: “Is Neil a leg or a breast man?”), and ITV screen couple Johnny Briggs and Amanda Barrie (Coronation Street’s Mike and Alma Baldwin).
Rounding out the episode was Gary Rhodes, the football-mad spiky-haired telly chef — Nigel Kennedy with a Crock-Pot, basically — who’d just started making a name for himself by reinventing older than old school British staples such as faggots, fishcakes, oxtail and bread and butter pudding in his own thoroughly amiable and unpretentious way.
That Briggs was a distant cousin on my mother’s side and Barrie a friend of Dorothy (literally — it’s also Mrs Merton’s first name) was of trifling consequence that night, despite Mrs M’s sarcastic quip that the all-singing, all-chatting pair were “the new Ike & Tina Turner.”
That’s because the killer question was aimed unfairly and squarely at the Rhodes:
“You know, my favourite cook was always Fanny Cradock, and I’m always thinking of her. How often do you think of Fanny?”
It may not be as widely quoted as her gag about “the millionaire Paul Daniels” but it lodged in the consciousness enough that when the final series was being aired in the spring of 1998, my sister Stella chose a moment when we were being driven round Marble Arch by her then university boyfriend Steve to voice her disinterest.
“I don’t think Mrs Merton is that funny. I mean, ‘How often do you think of fanny?’. Really?”
“But it’s all about the delivery,” I countered. “A woman playing a blue-rinsed old dear can get away with asking rude questions while pretending to be naive and innocent, whereas Parky or Partridge couldn’t.”
Stella conceded the point, which doesn’t happen too often. And come the new millennium she found herself thinking of fanny rather more than anyone expected, including her good self.
By 2006, I found myself dating someone who — I need to tread carefully here — was known to his friends as JTF, short for John the Footman — because of his long-standing job prior to us having met, as chief footman to the royal household.
Since the recent arrest of a certain arsehole formerly known as a prince on his 66th birthday JTF’s been mentioned in the news, though I don’t believe the papers have named him… yet. Either way, he’s the man. The man who punched the then Duke of York in the face, which resulted in HM Queen Elizabeth II refusing to accept his resignation, and which explains why he always held her and the Duke of Edinburgh in the highest regard, years after he did eventually leave Buckingham Palace.
In the noughties John ditched the footwork for a cushy private butler position at the American ambassador’s residence in Regent’s Park. And by the summer of ’06 he found himself as general manager for — you’ve guessed it — Gary Rhodes, via a contractor arrangement with Roux Fine Dining at HSBC in St James, Piccadilly. The pomme doesn’t fall far from the palace, eh.
I only met Rhodes briefly in a service elevator at HSBC just prior to JTF and I going to dinner at the Ritz round the corner. It was John’s birthday and, coincidentally, the day before the now double Michelin-starred superchef added an OBE to his list of gongs. He was as cheerily personable as you’d expect and it was certainly a sad loss when he died suddenly in 2019 in Dubai, aged just 59.
From Mountbatten-Windsor to mount battle-axe, and as a former chef myself the fearsome reputation Fanny had still loomed large enough that when I and John’s successor participated in an episode of a Channel 4 programme called Generation Sex I couldn’t resist slipping in a namecheck for the monstrous harridan.
“Fanny Cradock, eat your heart out.”
Because of course, everything comes back to Fanny.
Lovely!
Steve Pafford
