Adam: Hey, let me show you a funny clip from an
old British cookery program.
Keith Floyd: Food and eating and drinking is conducted
around a table.
Around a table, conversation takes place.
Out of conversation, ideas are born.
Out of ideas plays, festivals and theater is created.
Why couldn't we do that here?
Anyway, I digress.
I'm sorry I'm digressing.
Actually, I enjoyed that digression.
I'm going to have a little slurp, and then, if you'll be kind enough to come down to the
important bit of the whole day's proceedings, are these lovely scallops.
Okay.
Adam: Imagine if the good people at the British
Broadcasting Corporation cross-bred James Bond with your favorite grandma who cooked
but also drank and swore a little too much.
The issue of such a union would have been Keith Floyd, star of my favorite cooking show
ever made, "Floyd on Fish."
Keith Floyd: It seems to be a terrible thing to do to your
family, but I always wanted my mother-in-law on one of my programs, and it's taken me 25
years to catch her, actually.
Adam: My man, with the mother-in-law jokes.
Classic.
Not the kind of thing you could really say on television nowadays, nor should you, perhaps.
But then again, even the original viewers in 1985 would have wondered, how did this
make it on the telly?
There's a drunk man standing in front of a single handheld camera and he just doesn't
seem to realize this is actually going to be broadcast without much editing.
Keith Floyd: Tell you what, if you just hold there a minute.
You just keep gazing at these, would you?
Can you come in closer?
I want to get Erica a moment.
Hold on there.
You just keep looking at them.
They're very beautiful.
Erica, could you spare a moment please?
Erica?
Erica: Yeah.
Keith Floyd: I'm sorry to interrupt you.
You couldn't come through to your kitchen, could you?
Because what I'd like you to do, we've left you a dreadful mess here.
Come around, look at Erica because this is her kitchen.
We've ruined it all morning.
We've trampled over the lawn.
We've abused her oyster farm.
We've drunk her wine, we've used her electricity and gas.
And all I've got to offer you is either, and the choice is yours, one of my mussels or
a big kiss.
Erica: Oh.
Keith Floyd: Which would you have?
Erica: A big kiss.
Keith Floyd: Thanks ever so much.
Adam: She looks comfortable.
Keith Floyd: I enjoyed being here.
Adam: Who is this mad man and who gave him his own
show?
Please allow me to sing for you The Ballad of Keith Floyd.
Our man Floyd was born during the war, 1943, in Redding, England, or outside of Redding.
And his parents were totally working class, but they did scrounge up enough money to send
him to Wellington School, which is a public school.
And by public, of course, the Brits mean private school.
Wellington is not the fanciest of such schools, but it is perhaps where Floyd learned some
of his upper class airs and where he got a peak at the good life enjoyed by richer classmates.
Actually, nobody's life was that good in Britain at the time.
This is the era of endless, grim post-war austerity.
This is the era when British food obtained its reputation as just being greasy, gray
stuff that's poured out of a can.
And of course, by can, I mean tin.
After a stint as a cub reporter for the Bristol Evening Post, Floyd joined the army, inspired
he says by the movie "Zulu," even though "Zulu" came out a year after he actually joined the
army.
Which he actually did do, he was a tanker and he cooked a lot.
Discharged in his early 20s, Floyd went back to Bristol, where he worked a series of menial
restaurant jobs and eventually worked his way up to sous chef at a fancy hotel restaurant.
But being the silver-tongued hustler that he was, by the time he got to his late 20s,
he owned three restaurants in Bristol.
They all failed.
I cannot track down the providence of this photo that I found online, but I'm pretty
sure that's him around this time.
Floyd just drank way too much to run a restaurant properly.
And he had a tendency to do things like he'd stumble into the dining room and declare,
"All drinks on me, darlings," and that was not sustainable.
His marriages tended to follow a similar pattern — five wives.
Anyway, he took whatever money he could salvage out of the three restaurants and he got himself
on a yacht and sailed around the Mediterranean for a while.
And eventually, he tried to make a fresh start with a new restaurant in the south of France.
Keith Floyd: Good morning.
It's a very, very early morning, but the sun's shining and we finally made it to Saint-Malo.
Excuse me if I'm looking a bit rough, but the crossing was a bit heavy.
Anyway, look at that.
Adam: Yeah, his French restaurant failed too, but
Floyd came back to Bristol as an evangelist for British consumption of British fish.
An astounding amount of British fish was ending up in French markets at the time as British
cooks didn't really understand or appreciate it.
Keith Floyd: And all of the crabs that are here all come
from England, from Devon and Somerset in Cornwall coasts.
That's what our fishermen are doing.
We're not eating it, the French are.
But well done the British fishermen for providing it anyway.
Adam: Once the '80s rolled around, Floyd had a somewhat
successful restaurant in Bristol.
He had a cookbook out and he'd been noticed by a BBC producer named David Pritchard.
This was a good development for Floyd's career, though probably not his health as Pritchard
was a fellow, big eating, hard drinking man.
The pair of them would swing into a new town, drink it dry, and then the next morning, they
would try to film a cookery program, still obviously "pissed," as the Brits would say.
Keith Floyd: We're going to take a superb filet off here,
running the knife, hopefully up the bone.
I'm sorry, I have just done that completely the wrong way around.
You must always start filleting a fish from its head and run with the flow of the fish,
but I'll do it properly from here on in.
And before I do that, I'm going to have a little slurp because I'm a bit nervous today.
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Anyway, Keith Floyd.
Before Keith Floyd, cooking shows in Britain were presented by the likes of Philip Harben
or Fanny Cradock.
They had a slight zany energy, but they were still pretty sober affairs.
There is nothing sober about the seven episodes of the original 1985 "Floyd on Fish" series.
Shambolic seems like an appropriately British descriptor.
Keith Floyd: In this bubbling, fishy, fun-filled program,
I'm going to tell you the mysteries of the bouillabaisse, how to improve your sex life,
and explain the contents of my little black case.
Okay?
And I'm sorry for the cock up earlier, but now you get down to the serious business.
If you want to watch, you're very welcome, but I can't really spend too much time with
you at this precise moment.
Don't look at me.
I'm trying to explain the food.
This is a food program, you half-wit.
Come back.
Adam: I'm sure Floyd actually was fun to work with
at times, but his act did tend to wear thin on people.
He's the kind of guy who just takes up all the oxygen in the room.
And that could make things awkward whenever he had to share the camera lens with another
human, as in this episode with Rick Stein, who became a celebrity chef himself after
this rather rough introduction to television on Floyd's show.
Keith Floyd: You've all got that at home, those ingredients.
In fact, you could use any root vegetables you fancied.
This is Nick's home, very special recipe.
Rick Stein: Rick, dear boy, Rick.
Keith Floyd: Rick.
Oh, I'm terribly sorry.
But once you've seen one cook, you've seen them all.
Adam: Producer David Pritchard would eventually
break up with Floyd and get into business with Chef "Nick" Stein, there.
Remember that British TV series are generally rather shorts, little one-offs.
There are seven episodes of "Floyd on Fish" and that's it.
But one series was enough to make Keith Floyd a star and he ended up making a lot more.
Keith Floyd: If I'd carry on eating fish like I was doing
in the last series, I'd have developed fins by now.
And actually, I'm bored to death with fish and I want to get back to a bit of simple
peasant cooking and some red meat.
Adam: I have to say by this point, I think Floyd
had already jumped the shark.
He'd just gotten more and more self-indulgent and high on his own shtick.
Through it all he continued to drink and get divorced and make terrible business decisions.
This clip is from around 1990.
Keith Floyd: The restaurant business in cooking is a pretty
expensive sort of disease and it's a drug.
And after about 13 different establishments, I vowed never again.
I've got this wonderful job on telly, don't have to see customers ever again.
What did I do five years later?
Open a pub, which is silly, but it's a nice break from the otherwise semi-globe-trotting,
luxurious life that I'm fortunate enough to lead.
Adam: Hey, who else is in that shot?
Why, it's young Marco Pierre White.
This is from one of Marco's first series simply called Marco.
Marco Pierre White: That's it.
Keith Floyd: Have a drop of water, my dear.
Adam: Only in Britain do you hear a pair of certified
AlphaChads calling each other "my dear" and "darling."
I love it.
Floyd's alcoholism was, in fact, no laughing matter, but he laughed about it anyway, as
in this clip from Irish television, "Kenny Live."
Floyd used to call his hangovers "the wrath of grapes."
And he identified three distinct hangover types, the "double whammy," the "time bomb."
Keith Floyd: And then there's the third one, which is the
"creative" hangover.
That's when you do get back to work and you think everything's absolutely fine.
The truth is, in this instance, you are still slightly intoxicated.
Those are the three principle hangovers.
Pat Kenny: You think you're doing fine, but everybody
knows.
Keith Floyd: You think you're doing fine, but everybody
else knows that you can't.
And I'm going to have a quick...
Adam: Yeah, Floyd was not fine.
His boozy later years were spent shooting additional TV series and running additional
restaurants into the ground.
He lived in Thailand for a while, Singapore, or France, where the actor Keith Allen tracked
him down in 2009.
He shot a documentary there called "Keith Meets Keith."
Keith Floyd: James, can I have a drink, darling?
Keith Allen: Although Keith's first love is French cuisine,
he still adores those childhood tastes.
I'd bought him some very hard to obtain comfort food from England.
Keith, I bought you some Hayward's Piccalilli.
Keith Floyd: Fantastic.
Keith Allen: How about this?
Keith Floyd: Corned beef.
Adam: You're looking at a man who is only 65 years
old.
That's what a lifetime of smoking and boozing does to your face, kids.
Keith Floyd died of a heart attack the night this aired on Channel 4, reportedly as he
sat down to watch himself.
Marco Pierre White told the BBC, a "little piece of Britain" had died with Floyd.
Alcoholism isn't fun, but God help me, the original "Floyd on Fish" series really, really
is fun.
And it's preserved on YouTube, thank goodness.
Clear your calendar and go watch the whole thing.
Though it's also sad to think that Floyd's evangelism for British seafood may have contributed
to the decimation of wild fish stocks in the Northeast Atlantic.
Cod was Keith's favorite, and according to the conservation non-profit Oceana, nine of
the region's cod stocks are depleted, worse than any other fish.
Add that to the list of reasons why there will never be another Floyd on Fish, nor should
there be.
It's time to move on from the days when a man would dress up as if for the opera, consume
food and drink to dangerous excess and get handsy with the ladies in the kitchen.
He offered her a mussel or a kiss and she actually chose the kiss, so I'm guessing she
was actually into it.
But it's still not good behavior, dear boy.
Times have changed and that's good, but there was lots that was good about the past and
I'm glad to see it bottled up in "Floyd on Fish."
Sail on, my dear boy, Floyd.
I'll try to catch a fine fat one for you, if there are any left.