Shooting the Cook

‘All people in this country want is cod, plaice and ’addock.’ He started to point with his razor-sharp filleting knife. ‘All these red mullet, all these cuttlefish, these ’ere gurnards, is all shipped over to Spain.’ Fred was getting a bit cross now, walking across the slippery fish boxes, balancing on their edges like an angry seal. ‘The mentality over ’ere is, if we don’t bloody well know what these fish are, we don’t bloody eat ’em. It’s a bloody shame. It breaks my ’eart it does, to see all this good fish sent over there to arrive three or four days later in some bloody Spanish port, way past its prime. It’s a national disgrace it is. It really bloody is.’

What an interesting subject, I thought. Here we had all these lovely fish arriving as fresh as daisies and we were selling them to the Spanish and also the French because we didn’t fancy eating them ourselves. Could it be that as an island we were a bunch of fish haters because in days past fish was just too plentiful? I could remember when I came home from school and the house used to stink of fish because my mother boiled cod shoulders for the cat’s tea. It put me off fish for years.

But thanks to Fred Brimmacombe, I knew what my new programme was going to be about. It was going to be an evangelical food programme led by my very own Billy Graham, the man I’d met many months earlier in a Bristol restaurant. I could see Keith Floyd as the fishermen’s champion, showing the people at home how silly it was to export all this fresh, cheap fish to the Continent when we should be eating it ourselves. And this wouldn’t be a five-minute flash in the pan wedged between a rock band and a film on the architecture of Swindon. This would be a whole programme devoted to this dreadful waste of a precious resource. It might even be a series.

Maybe I should nip up to Bristol now to see Keith for a drink and start making plans, I thought. But the turbot looked far too good. I imagined it gently poached in a court bouillon for fifteen minutes or so and then served with hollandaise, new potatoes, and watercress. Maybe I’d see him tomorrow.

When we met again Floyd had lost a bit of his sparkle. He was in the kitchen of his bistro on the phone and having a difficult time judging by the way he was dragging on his cigarette. I gathered from the bits of conversation I was trying not to hear that he was immersed in financial difficulties, and from what I could glean, the person on the other end of the phone was refusing to deliver any more produce until the bill was settled. It was a painful telephone call which had gone well beyond that old familiar stopgap of ‘a cheque is in the post’. I wished I had arrived a bit later because he looked completely dejected as he put the receiver down, and not at all like the swaggering adjutant I’d seen all those months before.

He was in the middle of cooking freshwater crayfish and I’d never set eyes on one before. What beautifully designed things they were, rather like cherry-red Matchbox edition toy lobsters crossed with JCBs. They were being extremely aggressive to each other and I could imagine that if they were the size of dachshunds they’d take over the world. I discovered over lunch they also tasted wonderful, like sweet nutty shrimps. Floyd didn’t eat very much. He was drinking large Scotches with lots of ice and puffing away on endless cigarettes, detailing his thoughts on why the British people have no respect for good food, while the French revere it.

I toyed with the idea of contradicting him by pointing to the hillock of discarded crayfish shells on my plate, compared to his rather full ashtray, but thought it best not to. It dawned on me at the time that one of the differences between a gourmand and a gourmet might well be this: a gourmet is someone with a relatively small appetite and an academic interest in food, who’d rather talk about it than eat it; a gourmand relishes the infinite joys and pleasures of eating.

During lunch we discussed filming, money, locations, dishes. In fact, the money was a bit of a sticking point because everyone at that time assumed television had money to burn, after all it was seen as a glamorous industry. But regional television, along with local radio, was the church mouse of the BBC and the budgets reflected that. Two thousand pounds was all I had to make each half-hour programme of Floyd on Fish, a programme destined to be shown in the south-west only. This meagre budget had to pay for Keith, the film crew, travel and accommodation, film stock and hospitality, which inevitably included many bottles of wine. My salary and the post production costs like editing and dubbing were excluded from that sum. This was 1984. To make a similar programme today you’d have to multiply that figure by twenty-five at least.

Am I supposed to rehearse this? And do I need more than one fish?

I used to have a recurring nightmare while learning the rudiments of rugby at school. I found the rules of rugby union extremely complicated, especially things like the offside regulation, and the fact that you had to pass the ball backwards to your teammates seemed totally unnatural. It seemed to me the game would be so much more interesting if you were allowed to throw the ball forwards. And as for scrums; what on earth was that all about? In my nightmare I would find myself playing for the England Colts at Twickenham, with the stands packed with young enthusiasts. I’d be fortunate enough to catch a high pass but would find myself stopping for a few moments to decide what to do. Should I run with the ball? Should I pass it back or kick it forward? In the meantime a whole mountain of flesh from the opposing side would fall on me and afterwards the scorn of the crowd and fellow members of my team would sound like 10,000 baying wolves. ‘Look,’ I would say, standing alone on the pitch, ‘this is very complicated. I was just trying to decide what was the best thing to do.’ Such was my quandary now.

Our very first location was at a fine restaurant in Devon called the Horn of Plenty and it was run by Sonia Stevenson, a lively woman with a cut-glass accent and a deep passion for food. She said she first wanted to be a cook when she started to make mud pies with her friends as a child. An assistant producer at Plymouth, Jeremy Mills, suggested we shoot there because of her formidable reputation as a cook.

Floyd and I drove through the high hedgerows of Devon to the restaurant. Bluebells, red campions and primroses lined the way as we crunched over the gravel that led to the entrance of this imposing Victorian house. Sonia was waiting on the front steps dressed in her chef ’s whites and looking very professional. Warming to the theme of our programme, she said she had chosen to cook hake in a lemon and butter sauce because the Spanish were nicking all these lovely fish from around our coasts and she wanted to show people how good they were. Splendid, said Floyd, rubbing his hands together.

We started to film and suddenly I realized why, until now, all those cookery shows had been recorded in a studio. With four cameras or so you can have a whole assortment of shots, from close-ups of the ingredients to a wide angle of the kitchen, as well as mid-shots of the cook and guest. But where was my one camera supposed to be looking? At Floyd’s face? At his hands? In the cooking pot? Where? The film was rolling through and I kept it on a shot wide enough to see Keith and Sonia plus the fish and the other ingredients. I think I had a touch of ‘rabbit in the headlights’ syndrome.

Apart from making a very short item with Floyd cooking his rabbit dish, I’d never done anything like this before. Fortunately I was saved by the cameraman, Malcolm Baldwin, suggesting that it would be quite a good idea to cut at this point and set up a closer shot of the subject, which was the fish. ‘Ah! I get it,’ I thought, as Sonia started to cut the hake into cutlets—but what happens next? It was a bit like a jigsaw puzzle, except you had to saw out the pieces personally before you began.

Day one of a new series, and technically I wasn’t up to it: it was a pretty cathartic moment for me. I could tell by the way Floyd was looking at me that he knew I’d lost the plot. I could feel the respect levels plummeting and I thought to myself, ‘I wish I hadn’t done this. I wish I hadn’t done this.’ A director has to be in charge, or everything spirals out of control.

I learnt a set of valuable lessons that day and they are: do a thorough ‘recce’ of the location; discuss in detail the actual cooking process, something you should be able to commit to memory; and make sure there’s another stand-in fish and duplicate ingredients so that you can film all the close-ups of the cooking process in beautiful back-lit photography later on. Also, if the camera is stuck on a tripod, there is very little it can do, whereas if it is handheld it becomes the viewer’s eager eye. I just wish someone had told me before. It would have saved so much pain and angst.

Old dogs can learn new tricks

Very early in morning after filming at The Horn of Plenty, Keith, me and the crew were on a trawler heading out of Plymouth Sound on our way to the fishing grounds about twenty miles out. I’ve been on many trawlers since and regardless of nationality and age they all seem to smell the same: cigarette smoke, diesel, and a whiff of last week’s fish. There was one more important lesson I had learnt by the end of yesterday’s filming, and that was: as the programme was called Floyd on Fish, it should be Keith doing the cooking, not anyone else, because that’s what I hired him for in the first place. So after filming with Sonia we had visited The Navy, a pub on Plymouth’s Barbican, and held a council of war.

‘When they bring up the net,’ I said to Keith, ‘why don’t you select a lovely fish and cook it on-board for the trawler crew?’ There was a long silence as people thought it over.

‘Let’s get this right,’ said Floyd, pulling on his cigarette. ‘You want me to cook on a trawler. We don’t even know if it has a galley to cook in, let alone any implements.’

That’s true, I thought, but surely they all have galleys because sometimes they’re out there for days, if not a week at a time, and their sandwiches would get mighty stale and curly if they didn’t.

After a while, rather like the doctor in a cowboy film instructing the gunslinger who has to help him deliver a baby in the wilds of Arizona, Floyd said, ‘OK! I’ll need some cream, a skillet, a sharp knife, a spatula, butter, cider, parsley and chives, and you’d better bring a camping stove just in case.’

Now, out in the English Channel on a trawler swaying from side to side in a force-five wind, we waited patiently before we heard the clank of chains and the whine of the winch which signalled the net was about to come aboard. Suddenly, from nowhere, there were dozens of seagulls screeching overhead. This was a really exciting moment because no one knew what the net would contain. It took an age to bring it in and then it was hoisted on a jib above the deck like a giant haggis, swaying and spraying water and smelling of the very essence of the sea. The skipper gave the order to release the cod end—that’s the knot at the bottom of the net—and out spilt a bizarre collection of fish, seaweed, rocks, lots of mud and bits of old motorbikes. Then a hose was turned onto this muddy heap and you could start to see the beautiful fish shining like jewels: hake, scallop shells, a couple of ling, whiting, and pollack and there, in the middle, as ugly as sin, a monkfish.

In the tiny galley barely big enough for two people Floyd was on top form, cooking his monkfish the way they do in Normandy. It didn’t take very long and in a way he began to take over the directing of the scene himself by suggesting to the camera that it would be jolly nice to see the cream go in on a close-up shot so that people could watch it amalgamate with the cider. I couldn’t help notice the faces of the skipper and deckhand as they peered through the window at him from the wheelhouse; they must have thought we were all barking mad. I had to keep my eyes firmly on the horizon, desperately fighting a losing battle against the relentless tide of nausea sweeping over me, as Floyd served the fish up on a plate that had seen better days, and with a couple of forks he found in a drawer, offered it up to the crew to try. It looked good, as good as if it had been prepared in a restaurant in Honfleur. The fish was firm and white and the cider sauce was a velvety pale gold, flecked with green from the herbs. After sampling a mouthful, the fishermen said they liked it, but being fishermen they didn’t enthuse too much. Curiously, it was the first time either of them had tasted monkfish. I had the distinct feeling they would have much preferred a bacon sandwich.

The next day we found ourselves filming in Newlyn fish market. Markets are a joy to film in, because as a general rule fishermen and fish merchants don’t give a tinker’s cuss about being filmed and just get on with the business of making money. There’s a lot of noise and bustle and men with beards and beer bellies who do, however, have a slightly menacing attitude towards incomers. Making a living from the sea is a hard life and if you don’t belong to the fraternity then you don’t really belong here. I think we all sensed this while we were nursing our hangovers and desperately trying to avoid being run over by forklift trucks.

I don’t think it helped that Floyd was wearing a very expensive Burberry trench coat and a brown trilby hat. He looked as if he’d be more at home at Goodwood or Newmarket. We filmed Keith wandering around the boxes of fish, stopping occasionally to pick up a good specimen and put it down, and oddly I noticed that wherever he went he left a trail of fishermen in his wake doubled up with laughter. I knew he was charismatic, but this was extraordinary. These men were normally dour and suspicious, but here they were laughing at whatever Keith was saying (which I couldn’t hear because I didn’t have headphones on). Then I realized what had caused such mirth. Someone had stuck a label on the back of his expensive raincoat saying ‘fresh prick’.

I could hardly breathe for laughing so much but Floyd really didn’t find it funny at all. In fact, he looked quite hurt. When I’d finally stopped laughing I suggested that Keith should tell the audience what kind of unusual fish there were in the market that morning, preferably fish the merchants couldn’t sell in England and were shipping off to Spain and France instead. I should have known that Keith hates to be made a fool of and will always try to get his own back in any way he can.

Once the camera was rolling he picked up a red mullet and said what wonderful fish these were; in France they were highly revered and they called them the woodcock of the sea, because like woodcock, they were cooked with their guts intact. He then went on to talk about other fish that we as a nation ignore, preferring the safer options of cod, plaice, and haddock. Finally he took a fish I’d never seen before. It was a handsome browny-green fish with a spiky, lethal-looking dorsal fin.

‘And now my little gastronauts,’ said Floyd to the camera—and I may not have this word perfect, but it went something like this—‘I want to tell you about this chap here. He’s called a weaver and over in France they serve him in bouillabaisse. He’s got a wonderful sweet flavour and a firm texture but over here he’s regarded as a nuisance because people might tread on him and have to be carted off to hospital.’

He then went on to suggest that the camera show a close-up of the spines of the weaver fish. ‘Look at these pricks,’ he said (rising emphasis on the word pricks I noticed), ‘because they could do you serious harm—and there seem to be an awful lot of pricks in this fish market.’ Point taken.

That evening Floyd visited a tarot card reader. He didn’t have to go very far because she was sitting near the entrance to the restaurant where we were eating with the crew. I couldn’t hear what she was saying but I could tell that she fancied him and it looked as if the feeling was mutual. They were drinking wine and laughing, and occasionally glancing back at the table where I was sitting with the crew. Eventually the consultation ended and he returned to his seat. With a beaming grin he told us the cards could foresee a tremendous future for him. He would become a household name and all his money worries would be a thing of the past. However, before he reached the heights of his powers the relationship with the ‘joker’ (I assumed he meant me) would be too strained to continue and would cease. Bloody hell, I thought, ‘we haven’t made one programme yet and already I have a sense of doom’. It took a few years, but the tarot reader was right.

Fair stood the wind for France

Halfway through filming our first series, Floyd on Fish, we caught the ferry to Saint-Malo. The idea was to test that old fish merchant Fred Brimmacombe’s theory that the French adore practically anything that comes from the sea whereas we, with a few exceptions, prefer cod, plaice, and haddock.

Just a hundred miles south of Plymouth there’s a whole different attitude to the fishy delights that come from this piece of sea separating our two countries. The thing that interested me was why that should be. Was it history or circumstance, maybe due to hardship or war?

When I first set eyes on the town from the deck of the ferry I thought how beautiful it looked, like a huge Walt Disney castle with mighty walls and towers and turrets rising from the sea. Conversely, I thought of the first thing that would greet passengers when they sail from France to Plymouth—a large, smouldering scrap metal yard right next to the docks. I felt sure, after seeing this delightful town from the ship, we’d find people eating small hillocks of shellfish on every street corner and I wasn’t wrong.

We were here for three days, enough time to film the fish market in the morning, maybe a restaurant at lunchtime and possibly the famous oyster beds in the afternoon. After leaving our kit at the hotel it was time to get our bearings and begin to explore the town. It was late afternoon now and beginning to get cold. The all important fish market was empty at this hour, the stone counters washed down ready for business the next morning. We walked through the narrow ancient streets with their high walls. It was like a film set in which you might turn a corner and glimpse a weary knight returning from the Crusades, leading his trusty steed in search of lodgings for the night. Just six hours on a ferry and we had arrived in a different world.

After a couple of drinks we thought we’d find somewhere in which to eat all sorts of fish for the entire evening. Floyd announced, ‘I’ll find a really good restaurant but you’ve got to trust me. I don’t want to read any guides, I’ll just do it by sight, smell, and gut instinct.’

He examined the menu of the first restaurant, built into the town wall by the main entrance. We waited patiently while he had a peep inside, before declaring it far too expensive, but perfect for Americans who didn’t know any better. We continued, like a band of hunters, with Keith as our German pointer flushing out pheasants. He’d pop into a hotel and come out a few seconds later only to give it the thumbs down. There were six of us, including Clive the cameraman, Timmy on sound, Andy, the assistant cameraman, who also helped with the lights, and Frances Wallis, my trusty Scottish assistant and mother to us all—and we were all ravenous. I was dreaming of half a dozen oysters, followed by fish soup and maybe a large grilled Dover sole and a bottle of fresh, clean-tasting Muscadet, but still we traipsed on. Fortunately Saint-Malo is a compact town.

Finally, Keith stopped outside a small place with steamed-up windows called Au Gai Bec (At the Happy Mouth).

‘This is what I was looking for,’ he said. A warm glow, the sound of good conversation and clinking plates were coming from inside. ‘You can keep your Michelin stars. Steamed-up windows: the first sign of a busy, happy restaurant.’

We went in and the warmth and smells of buttery fish soup, garlic, and a hint of Gauloise hit us straight away. Curiously it wasn’t dissimilar to Keith’s Bistro back in Bristol. It was packed, but the owner, who wore Buddy Holly glasses, asked us to wait and have a drink at the small bar. From where we were standing you could glimpse the kitchen where a young woman and an older lady—her mother perhaps—toiled over an antiquated stove. It was perfect.

That evening was one of the happiest we ever spent as a film crew on the road. The food was quite wonderful. We shared a large platter of fruits de mer, like a glossary of seafood from the continental shelf: oysters and shrimps, clams of every size, winkles and whelks and raw cockles. Next we had a freshly made cotriade, a Breton fish stew made with that day’s catch, which included meaty chunks of conger eel, mackerel, and sardines. We were the last customers in the place, a perfect opportunity to get to know the owner, Jacques Yves. We didn’t need to tell him how much we enjoyed the food, but we did anyway. Over a fine pear tart and sorbets made with Calvados we told him of our mission to understand France’s love affair with fish. He assured us that we’d come to the right place and promised to help us in any way he could. In true Field Marshal Montgomery fashion we declared that from that moment on the Happy Mouth would be our brigade headquarters—and it was, for a number of years to come.

The next day involved a very early start and already, in that lovely restaurant where we were so happy, it had gone past midnight. Jacques Yves said that to wind down he usually had a nightcap on his way home, in a little bar not far away from here.

‘No, no,’ I protested. ‘It’s important we all get a good night’s sleep because we have to film in the fish market at first light and that is the sole (no pun intended) reason we came here in the first place. So let’s have no more talk of nightcaps. It’s bedtime now and that includes everybody.’

Approximately two hours later Keith and I tottered back along the cobbled streets to our hotel, feeling extremely happy with ourselves. Of course, Clive, Timmy, Andy, and Frances had sensibly gone to bed as soon as the meal was over and Keith and I had only popped in out of politeness really, but Jacques Yves was quite right, it was a lovely little bar, and once the locals found we were from the BBC they wouldn’t let us buy a drink.

The next morning I had a hangover of humungous proportions and worse, far worse, I’d slept through my alarm call. Even the hotel manager hadn’t been able to wake me. And so the others all went off to film at the market while I slept on. It was an unforgivable act and I was deeply ashamed. In times of war I’d have been tied to a cannon wheel and shot—deservedly so. However, as luck would have it, there weren’t too many locals out buying fish that early in the morning. Apparently, the market wouldn’t start to get busy until ten o’clock when the sun had crept over the high walls of the town, flooding the streets with golden light. So Keith and the crew had returned to the hotel for café au lait served in huge ceramic bowls and warm, fresh croissants with apricot jam. Thank you God.

When we returned to the market the stallholders seemed much less grumpy than their British counterparts. Maybe it was because they were so busy. There were rows and rows of tables piled high with oysters, all neatly marked in order of size. In my limited experience I knew the smaller native oysters—the flat ones with smooth shells—to be by far the best tasting. Then there were heaps of lively pink and apricot-coloured langoustines, clearly landed that morning, judging by the way they were trying to walk out of the market. The langoustine should be the culinary symbol of Brittany. Here the locals eat them simply boiled and served with mayonnaise. I made a note we had to try some before catching the ferry the next morning.

There was a large cauldron of whelks being boiled in seawater then scooped up with a huge wire ladle and unceremoniously plonked into fish boxes. I knew my hangover was fading fast when that hot shellfish aroma from the whelks, reminiscent of freshly cooked lobster, started to make me think about lunch.