Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A cook known for his anarchic television style and as the drinking man's cook, with a wine glass always to hand.
On the island
Eight records
When I first heard blue suede shoes, I have from that day to this wanted a pair of blue suede shoes.
I've always, always uh been terribly stirred by Nina Simone to love somebody.
Hey JudeFavourite
And if there was one record that encouraged me and said, You can really do it because it ain't that bad. It was Hey Jude.
And I haven't always got the courage to tell people what I really think of them, but there's one person who has, and that's Bob Dylan with Positively Fourth Street.
Ain't Nobody's Business If I Do
I lead a life where everybody tells me off. So I'd have to have that to remind me that I can choose what I do.
You Can't Always Get What You Want
I always find when I think about music it it always seems to be downbeat, but it's just too bad, but you can't always get what you want.
An imaginary love affair is a most wonderful experience. It's a Chris Christofferson song... I'd need to listen to that lots.
Chuck Berry wrote a brilliant song. It's called I Suppose It's All to Do With Where I'd Like To Be. A little known recording by Johnny Allen. It's called Promised Land and I think it's a really great place to be.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:56Was it a bit like an overnight success? Suddenly you were somebody.
Yes, I was. Um it was a very strange, strange thing. I was running a near bankrupt restaurant in Bristol. And about midnight the waitress came up and said, There's a gentleman on table five who wants to have a quick word with you and I went over to table five and there was this … sort of half asleep in a pile of lobsters and mussels … He said, I think that was a very good meal. Would you like to appear on television? … So I took absolutely no notice of this chap, but said, Fine, that's grand. The following day he phoned me up, said, I was absolutely serious last night. Would you like to make a T V programme? … And that was the beginning of it all.
Presenter asks
3:01How did you develop the style of your programmes, with you haranguing the cameraman and so on?
We were filming for the first time, and what I thought would happen … And what actually happened was they said, There, what are you going to do? I said, I don't know what I'm going to do. I've never done it before. … I said, the hell with it. You don't know what you're doing. I don't know what we're doing. Clive, look, have a look at this. This is a piece of fish. This is some parsley. This is a liquidizer. And it was just like that.
Presenter asks
9:46Would you say you'd been unlucky in love, Keith?
The keepsakes
The book
Mervyn Peake
It's a fundamental story of good trumphing over evil, and it's a very magnificent, big, big book. You can read it forever. I've read it four times.
The luxury
on Saturday nights on this desert island I want to go and do a bit of rock and rolling, so I want a really good pair of handmade blue suede shoes.
I would I wouldn't say unlucky as the word, but catastrophic, you're pretty closer to the mark, I think.
Presenter asks
13:59When you became a Cub reporter on the Bristol Evening Post, what did you envisage for yourself then?
No, it it is this uh romantic imaginary life I lead. I had read by the time I was sixteen I had read Evelyn Waugh and Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald and Graham Greene and I I was such a prodigious or avid reader of things that I thought I could be a writer and I thought the way to be a writer is to be a reporter. … I bought a trench coat. A bow tie and a trumpy hat. I must have looked a right wally.
Presenter asks
19:32Despite the enormous popularity of your restaurants, you didn't make any money, did you?
No, no, I didn't. I'm not mean enough fundamentally. Well, you gave them too much food. Probably. I mean, I I I expect I didn't really I used too much cream or too much butter or didn't quite charge enough or whatever.
Presenter asks
25:27What's your basic approach to cooking? What makes it special?
Well, what the idea is, is to use fresh, real ingredients and, as Jane Grigson said, do as little as possible to it. … I can put sunshine onto a plate. I really can. I can make tomatoes taste like Provence. And I don't know what I do. I can make a cocovan taste of burgundy. And I can show that to people and say this is all you have to do.
“The table is the other important piece of furniture in the house. The other one is the marital bed.”
“I'm impossible to live with, but I don't think it's my fault.”
“I lead a life where everybody tells me off.”
“But that's the whole point of everything, isn't it? I mean, is to keep on keeping on.”
“I can put sunshine onto a plate. I really can. I can make tomatoes taste like Provence.”