50 The Times Magazinemouth – along with going to restaurants and
dinner parties and the office canteen and the
school dinner hall and family celebrations
and all manner of other festivities – then,
I suppose, occasionally saying, “Hey, everybody,
why don’t I cook dinner tonight?” could have
been construed as an entertainment.
And off you went to the shops to buy
the ingredients and bought special wine and
laid the table all nicely and everyone sat down
and you told them the story behind the meal
and what it was supposed to be and it was all
great fun. And under those circumstances, yes,
possibly, there might have been room for sexy
lady chefs suggestively licking spoons on telly
and gormless, overweight Liverpudlian bakers
throwing flour about and excitable young men
on Saturday mornings showing what a laugh
you could have throwing together a Chinese
new year banquet at home... But not now.
Now, cooking is literally all we do. And
when I say cooking, I mean digging out
whatever we can find at the back of the fridge
and scraping the mould off it and heating
it until most of the bacteria are dead and
slapping it down in front of our family, again,
for the eleventy-fifth time that week, and
saying, “Get it down your necks, it’s all there
is, and then I want you suited and booted for
another miserable bloody walk in the rain.”
Only a lunatic could find joy in that. So
to be making television programmes about
it is just rude. Every TV chef chortling his or
her way through another exotic performative
dish on television is laughing in our faces and
revelling in our misery, turning a coin doing
the dreadful thing that we all have to do,
three or four or five times a day (depending
on whether we eat with our children or not),
and telling us that it’s meant to be fun.
They might as well make glittery upbeat
celebrity TV shows about all the fun we
should be having unloading the dishwasher,
or cleaning the loo, descaling the kettle,
doing some work, worming the cat, schoolingGiles
I’ll tell you another great thing about all this:
I reckon it may spell the end of TV cookery
shows. Not immediately. Not before we come
out of lockdown 3. But as we go into lockdown 4
in late September, and do another six months
of it, and then as the years roll on, and we
spend most of our lives like this, then I think
people will gradually come to see what I have
always seen, which is that all cookery-based
television is worthless, irritating, cynical
bogshite. And it will be stopped.
Esther is not of the same mind. I came in
only yesterday from another awful walk and
there she was on the sofa, splatted with
boredom against the cushions, eyes dully fixed
upon some frantic twat in an apron who was
leaping around a pretend kitchen, frying things
and laughing, while a couple of “celebrities”,
also in aprons, said how delicious things looked
and how they hadn’t realised that making an
omelette (or whatever) could be so easy and so
much fun. And I thought to myself, or possibly
said aloud, “Jesus Aitch Moses Mary and
Mohammed! Are they still making these stupid
shows where they try to pretend that cooking
is fun? And are you still watching them?”
Maybe she replied. Maybe she didn’t. Maybe
she was dead. Maybe we’re all dead and this
is Hell. And if it is, well, then I guess I always
knew there would be cookery shows here.
But, surely, the illusion that cooking a
meal is in some way interesting or amusing
or fulfilling and can be twisted – with enough
gurning and laughing and comedy spillages
and half-arsed anecdotes – into entertainment
is one that has been fully blown apart now,
by our common human experience of the
past 12 months.
Because if we have learnt anything from
all this, it is that cooking is not fun. Sure,
back when cooking was just one of the many
ways available to you for getting food in yourI hate cooking shows (and not just
because Esther has a thing for Jamie)
STAYING IN WITH THE CORENS
GILES & ESTHER’S LOCKDOWN 3 LIFE
the kids, putting the bins out, doing our VAT
return, washing our clothes, changing the
bed, worming the cat, loading the dishwasher,
cleaning the loo, doing some work, changing
the bed...
Cooking is not fun, okay? It’s not relaxing.
It’s not mindful. It’s not a gesture of love. It’s
not a form of self-expression. It’s just a thing
you have to do, to not get poisoned by the
calories you need to live. I truly cannot think
of a single reason anyone in their right mind
could possibly have for wanting to watch some
overpaid idiot doing it on telly.Esther
It’s called cooking fatigue. It’s a real thing.
The symptoms are being unable to think of
what to have for dinner except roast chicken;
feeling that your dream dinner, in fact, would
be three packets of Hula Hoops and a tub
of Philadelphia; having a strong urge to walk
out of the front door and keep going until you
hit the sea.
I’ve had it for years and it’s partly my fault.
When I met Giles, he could cook and I couldn’t.
In trying to make myself more appealing,
I learnt how. When I say “learnt”, what I mean
is I watched a lot of cookery shows presented
by Lorraine Pascale, Nigel Slater and Jamie
Oliver. Soon I was a much better cook than
Giles. My reward was to see him exit the
kitchen permanently, only to return from time
to time to ask me where everything is kept.
It was a fine rod I had made for my back.
TV cooks became not just my teachers but my
emotional support celebrities as the cooking
fatigue inexorably set in.
The sheer barrage of, in particular, Jamie
Oliver content recast him in my mind as a
cheerful staff sergeant hollering to my bored
lance corporal. “Give me a lovely-jubbly toad
in the hole, right now!” Or, “Drop and give me
TOM JACKSON a fish curry kinda thing!” He was always there