Product Description

By the age of eight, Jamie Oliver was already cooking in his parents' pub and restaurant in Essex. From Westminster Catering College, he went straight to the apron strings of Antonio Carluccio as his head pastry chef. Spotted by the director who would make Nigella, Jamie's cheeky chappy image in the kitchens of "The River Cafe" won him his own TV series, "The Naked Chef", by the tender age of 22. A monster advertising deal with Sainsbury's was soon to follow, allowing Jamie and his mates - strewn through his series as effortlessly as he chucked herbs on his easy dishes - to come into our sitting rooms several times a night.We watched him marry his sweetheart, become a father twice, and chewed our fingernails with Jools in Jamie's School Dinners", willing him to come home more often. His latest campaign, Jamie's "Fowl Dinners", highlights the animal welfare implications for chickens of our constant demand for cheap food. The story of Jamie Oliver is the story of a culinary revolution. Speaking to people at the very heart of this revolution, from chefs and food stars to politicians and media commentators, Gilly Smith asks if it was Jamie who struck the match, or whether it was simply time to turn up the heat under a world finally ready to feed itself.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #42026 in Books
• Published on: 2008-09-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

About the Author
Gilly Smith is the author of Nigella Lawson: The Biography (Andre Deutsch). She is a regular contributor to Junior magazine, and has written for The Times, the Daily Telegraph, Taste magazine and New Woman. She lives in Sussex with her writer husband and two daughters.

Excerpted from Jamie Oliver: Turning Up the Heat by Gilly Smith. Copyright © 2006. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 10. TV Nation

In the early Nineties British television was changing as the BBC pushed food into their schedules and took an early lead. Many of the commissioning editors personally witnessed the new food scene in Notting Hill, a 5-minute cab ride from the BBC TV Centre in London’s White City.

Food scares played their part in a new interest in what everyone was eating: BSE took beef off school menus in 1990, while Dolphin-friendly tuna made its way onto the supermarket shelves, encouraging people to think more about where our food came from. By 1993 The RSPCA had set up Freedom Food to implement stringent welfare standards for livestock, while in 1994 Fair Trade woke people up to the bigger picture of food consumption. Food began to drop into TV schedules as soupçons rather than anything meatier. TV chef and restaurateur Antony Worrall Thompson remembers the beginning of the change. ‘I did a programme called Hot Chefs while I was at 190 Queens Gate,’ he said. ‘That was a 10-minute slot after the 9 O’clock news. Gary Rhodes did his first TV appearance on it, too.’

Bite-sized chunks of cookery classes also came with the birth of daytime magazine programmes such as Good Morning with Anne and Nick in 1992, which launched the young Ainsley Harriott. The BBC’s Good Food Show had been introduced in Birmingham the year before, and the Corporation was keen to encourage this new trend as the BBC untied Auntie’s apron strings and emerged a dynamic business executive. ‘Keith Floyd gave birth to that whole style of TV programme in the Eighties,’ Worrall Thompson recalls, ‘and then we wanted more and more of it. Dinner parties were all carrot and coriander soup, floating nasturtiums and fish that had been cooked to death. We were desperate for knowledge but we didn’t put it into practice very often. Suddenly Floyd made everything very relaxed. It was radical – telling the camera to come in and have a look, while Floyd himself was having a glass of wine. Robert Carrier was in a studio, The Galloping Gourmet was entertainment but then it disappeared!
completely, and when the Roux Brothers and Delia came along, it was about education. Floyd was about bringing it back to entertainment again.’

The Eighties interest in ‘Leisure’ had given rise to ‘Aspiration’ in the Nineties, and suddenly producers clamoured for role models who could help change lives. Antony Worrall Thompson joined wine expert Jancis Robinson on Food and Drink on BBC2 to advise middle class palates what to serve up at dinner parties, and Ready Steady Cook took Ainsley Harriot off the morning slot and into primetime in 1993. Within the decade British homes were transformed with the help of a few impossibly good-looking designers and a few sheets of MDF (medium-density fibreboard). Bodies were given a rebirth with the help of some carefully chosen trousers and a couple of Sloaney fashionistas and social status boosted with a new confidence in the kitchen, and all through the magic of television.

After 10 years without home economics on the British National Curriculum and the rise in women fleeing the kitchen, convenience food flooded supermarket shelves and junk food began to take the place of many children's main meal of the day. British food campaigners, such as Caroline Walker, Tim Lang and Lizzie Vann, tried to persuade people that food, health and behaviour was interlinked, with Walker's book with Geoffrey Canon – The Food Scandal – making newspapers sit up and take notice of an increasingly frightening trend. ‘She [Walker] famously said that we know more about the content of a pair of socks than we do about what we are eating,’ said food and social affairs consultant Diane McRae, who would work with Jamie on Channel 4’s School Dinners (2005).

TV companies began to hire people like Walker, Canon, Tim Lang and Maurice Hansen, author of E for Additives, to consult on a new breed of programmes. Channel 4 jostled with the BBC for pole position, with programmes like Food File as early as 1992 taking serious food issues and making them accessible. The British government’s ‘Health of the Nation’ report, studies linking cancer and diet, the argument for organic farming were all now on a weekly prime time magazine show. The fact file accompanying the programme in which Food File put an average family from Worthing on the Mediterranean Diet (which was said to lower cholesterol and reduce weight) was the most requested fact sheet in Channel 4’s history at the time. The series launched the career of a young sous chef from The River Cafe, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, employed food campaigner, Tim Lang as a consultant (who would go on to advise on Jamie’s School Dinners), and hired the services young producer Pat Llewellyn.

By the mid-Nineties Pat Llewellyn was working at Wall to Wall Television, a production company known for its serious documentaries on cinema and philosophy. Word came from on high that ‘Lifestyle’ was the new buzz word in TV, and Jane Root, head of Wall to Wall and future controller of BBC2, sent a memo around the company asking if anyone knew anything about food or gardening. ‘I wrote back and said that I knew about food, so we worked on ideas and came up with Eat your Greens,’ said Pat. ‘There had been naff daytime things like Galloping Gourmet and Fanny [Craddock] in the afternoons, and then Floyd brought a traveller’s spin to that and a kind of post modern thing by calling the camera over. Food became about style and lifestyle, and said so much about sophistication and class.’