The Sunday Times December 19, 2021 29NEWS REVIEW
All Creatures, many more are
rooting for Scales since her
condition was revealed seven
years ago in her and her
husband’s popular travel
series Great Canal Journeys.
“My mother’s dementia
was an open secret in some
parts of the profession. Then,
when it became known
publicly, it became important
and desirable for us to treat
mild dementia with honesty
and as part of the series,
particularly because it didn’t
seem to affect her enjoyment
of what she was doing very
much,” West says.
For that reason, the show,
which ran for ten series, had
huge resonance with people
determined to live their lives
despite various afflictions.
“People who are in their
eighties on television, eitherWe wanted to
treat my
mother’s
dementia
with honesty
dramatically or in person, are
generally there because
they’re figures of fun or
tragedy,” West says. “The
series was a love story and it
was about dementia, but it
was also about two people
who know their way around
the canals. My father’s blind
spot is he still thinks it’s about
industrial architecture.”
The couple bowed out
from the show in 2019 as
Scales’s condition worsened.
Her short-term memory is
now “very bad. But she still
recognises me and knows I
have two daughters. I’m not
sure if she was aware of
lockdown or not. She’s quite
deaf, but generally she’s very
cheery, for which we’re very
thankful. She’s always acted
as if she’s 36 years old.” The
family frequently unite at the
couple’s house in southwest
London, and West father and
son hold season tickets at AFC
Wimbledon.
It was on West Sr, who, at
87, is still working, that his
worries were focused when
lockdown loomed. “It was
quite hard: it was mid-March
and Dad still kept going to the
theatre. I was screaming at
their housekeeper, ‘Just stop
him!’ Then it was full
lockdown, so he stopped and
was very sad. His
granddaughter from his
daughter from his first
marriage and his two great-
grandchildren live in the
basement of their house, but
he couldn’t see them until he
had had the vaccine. That
was very hard.”
As restrictions eased, West
worked with his parents on
his Pandemic Poetry Jukebox,
recordings he made, and then
broadcast on the app
SoundCloud, of himself and
actors such as Eddie
Redmayne and Benedict
Cumberbatch reading more
than 600 poems suggested by
the public. West Sr recorded a
sonnet. Scales read The Old
Ships by James Elroy Flecker
“absolutely perfectly on the
first take. Afterwards, she
started coming out with great
wodges of this poet by heart
and I realised she had perfect
recall of poems she’d learnt
as a schoolgirl.”
West, who has twodaughters aged seven and
four, keeps his fingers in
many pies — directing, acting
as patron of several charities,
campaigning for better arts
funding and being involved
with the actors’ union Equity.
He describes himself on his
Twitter biography as “always
geek”.
He read English at Oxford,
where he was a
contemporary of David
Cameron and Boris Johnson.
“And I was in the same
English set as Michael Gove. I
always got on with him. But I
didn’t know the others. I was
a member of the Socialist
Workers’ Party. We boycotted
the Oxford Union.”
His partner is the
playwright Laura Wade, 44,
whose most famous work,
Posh, skewers white-tied
public-school boys. “I don’t
think of myself as posh,” says
West, who attended the
private Alleyn’s School in
Dulwich, south London. “But
it would be foolish for me to
pretend that I hadn’t been
born into a life of enormous
privilege.”
He was in his forties when
he met Wade at the Crucible
theatre in her native
Sheffield, where he was
artistic director and she came
to discuss a play she’d
written. “I’m glad I became a
dad late in life because it gave
me someone I adore to go
halves on the babies with. I
wasn’t ready before. I was
broody for a long time but I
was also scared of not being
the most important person in
my life. And then I wasn’t the
most important person in my
life, and although that
brought terrible tensions anddifficulties, it’s also brought
the greatest joy.”
Shooting the latest All
Creatures, he snapped his
Achilles tendon, making
playing with the girls tricky.
“When I was younger, bits of
me didn’t go offline when I
banged them,” he says
mournfully. In lockdown,
while we dumped our
offspring in front of CBeebies,
West taught his girls chess.
“Home schooling was hard,
though,” he says. “I thought I
couldn’t have any more
respect for teachers, but I was
wrong.” And he made not
mere sourdough but its
Ethiopian flatbread cousin.
Such confessions make me
wonder if West is too much of
— as he puts it — “a
metropolitan wanker” to star
in a cuddly Channel 5 series.
Yet it’s precisely his highbrow
image that makes him so
enamoured of All Creatures.
“I’m so happy to be making
people laugh. I almost never
get asked to do comedy. I’ve
got quite a serious voice.
Much of the past 25 years I’ve
spent narrating
documentaries about Nazis,
and I play mainly posh
people: damaged Victorian
aristocrats or perverts. I can
be quite sanctimonious and I
can be quite opinionated and
I probably come across as a
bit serious.”
West says the period in
which All Creatures is set is
simpler to understand. “We
were in a fairly bad
depression. Fascism was
stalking Europe. It’s not rose-
tinted... We set our frame on
something quite small, like
whether a cow may miscarry.
If you’re talking about a
modern farm with 500 cows,
that’s a statistic. If you’re
talking about that farm on the
hill that’s been there for 350
years and owns one cow,
that’s a tragedy, and that’s all
you need for one episode.
Usually the calf is born, the
cow doesn’t die and people
cry. It was going to be bad,
and then it wasn’t. That’s a
story worth telling.”All Creatures Great and
Small’s Christmas special is on
Channel 5 on Christmas Eve at
9pmA Christmas special of All Creatures Great and Small is the balm we all need
after another trying year, its star Samuel West tells Julia Llewellyn Smith
Spoiler alert: this pet is
going to pull through
Samuel West in
All Creatures
Great and Small
and, aged 10,
with younger
brother Joe and
parents Timothy
West and
Prunella Scales.
Their series Great
Canal Journeys
was made after
Scales developed
dementiaE
arlier this year the actor
Samuel West wrote a
letter to his younger self
in which he reflected
that if he could choose to
have one last good
conversation with anyone, it
would be with his mother.
She is the actress Prunella
Scales, best known as Basil’s
long-suffering wife, Sybil, in
Fawlty Towers. At 89, she has
been suffering from
Alzheimer’s disease for 20
years.
“There was a Christmas
about ten years ago when I
was asking questions about
our living arrangements after
I was born. My father [the
actor Timothy West] couldn’t
remember; my mother
almost could remember —
and then it was gone. And I
realised then that there were
certain things I would never
now be able to know from
her,” West says.
“Since that moment it’s
been a process of getting used
to the idea that that final-reel
scene you think you’re going
to have with someone, with a
piano soundtrack, when you
both say everything that
needed to be said, isn’t going
to happen. Or isn’t going to
happen in quite the
same way.”
West, 55, has starred in
films such as Howards End,
taken to the stage for the RSC
and played the spy Anthony
Blunt in The Crown. Now he
has won new fans with his
role as the prickly yet
loveable vet Siegfried Farnon
in Channel 5’s cockle-
warming version of All
Creatures Great and Small —
the festive special of whicharrives on Christmas Eve.
The series is a delightful
by-product of Channel 5’s
decision three years ago to
cancel the reality show Big
Brother. “That freed up about
50 hours of its schedule and it
decided to fill them with
some high-quality drama,”
West says. It paid off: the two
series have pulled in about
three million viewers per
episode, the channel’s biggest
audience in five years.
And the appeal has been
international. American
audiences have been equally
enchanted by ravishing
footage of the Yorkshire
Dales, cute animals and 1930s
storylines, in which — without
doing any spoilers for the
Christmas special — the
greatest jeopardy surrounds
whether a lapdog will recover
from the trots. As a critic for
Rolling Stone magazine put it:
“It’s an incredible balm, and a
welcome contrast not only to
the dumpster fire of our own
reality but to a television
landscape where too many
shows, even the great ones,
are rooted in physical and
emotional trauma.”
West agrees. “There’s a lot
of good television at the
moment that is about terrible
things. I couldn’t watch telly
for a long time after my
children were born because it
all seemed to be about
terrible things happening to
children. And there’s a lot of
good television about people
who are very rich, but most
people don’t have very much
money, so this makes a
change.”
While many have fallen for
the balm of the reincarnatedand gave them to a farmer to rear before
getting a butcher to slaughter them. He
still dreams of the milk rolls made by the
baker next door. He’s hoping to be back in
Germany for Christmas; they open
presents on December 24 and then have a
traditional roast that evening — usually a
goose or a carp. The 25th is similar to a
British Boxing Day. At other times of year,
his favourite go-to Germanic dish ispotato pancakes fried with onion and
ham.
Krauss did not develop an interest in
cooking until much later, when he was
living alone in Frankfurt and working in
IT. He stumbled across a Harvard stu-
dent’s guide to Indian cooking on Usenet,
an early bulletin board, and it was a
eureka moment that led to him discover-
ing flavour and spice.Jürgen Krauss stole viewers’
hearts on Bake Off. Now he’s
serving up festive foodstuffs
from his youth. Please, have a
biscuit, he tells Rosie Kinchen
His approach to cooking is technical;
he likes to understand why a recipe will
work before he tries it. This is why the sci-
entific rigour of bread suits him so well.
He moved to the UK in 2002 to live with
Sophia, who is English, and is passionate
about Noh, an ancient form of Japanese
theatre. Krauss survived on old-school
British bread for eight years before he
started making his own. Was he driven to
baking by the poor quality of ours? “Well,
yes,” Krauss replies.
He came across a book by Andrew
Whitley, a former BBC producer who
opened a bakery in Penrith, in Cumbria.
Whitley is an advocate of “slow baking”,
the idea that you can leave flour and
water alone until the gluten forms itself —
“like strings of rubber” — rather than
helping it along with machines or man-
power. I am somewhat surprised to hear
this, since Krauss’s French slap, a knead-
ing method that involves dropping the
dough from a great height, with comic
sound effects, was one of the highlights of
the series. He chuckles: “You don’t have
time in the tent.”
He applied to be on Bake Off in 2012,
but this time around he was ready.
Because of Covid, competitors did their
practice and preparation stages at home
before moving into a hotel together for
five weeks. The hotel spa was closed
because of the pandemic and he put on
9lb, but otherwise Krauss enjoyed him-
self thoroughly.
The only time he felt out of his depth
was with the vegan sausage roll, which
collapsed in a soggy heap.
“I couldn’t relate to that bake at all,” he
says sadly.
There is something about Krauss, pos-
sibly his resemblance to Paddington
Bear, that brings out a protective instinct
in fans. This only added to the anger
when he was eliminated in the semi-
finals. He was the only contestant in the
patisserie round not to receive one of the
handshakes that Paul Hollywood, the
presenter, gives to competitors who have
exceeded expectations.
Viewers were furious, especially as
Krauss had won star baker three times,
more than anybody else in the semi-final.
Krauss, who had been hosting viewing
parties for friends and family each week,
must have known that people were not
going to take it well. “I was fearful,” he
agrees. “We all were.”
There was outrage when the episode
aired last month. “I’d take a rolling pin to
anyone in order to protect him,” tweeted
one fan. Krauss had to make calls to three
families with crying children to reassure
them that he was fine. He wrote a letter
assuring supporters that he bore no
grudges. “Who wants to fly to the moon
when you can be on Bake Off ?” he wrote.
He says he meant it.
For now he is enjoying the post-Bake
Off media whirl. His Instagram feed
shows him in a suit with a poodle at the
People’s Pet Awards. He is planning to
write a book of German recipes called
Jurgen’s World of Food. “That is what the
crowds want,” he says contentedly, and
hands me another biscuit.Bake like Jürgen! See our digital
editions for Krauss’s recipes for
gingerbread, stollen and Glühwein9, 2021EVIEW
b w b b b wI
had hoped to spend the day baking
Christmas biscuits with Jürgen
Krauss, the real star of this year’s
The Great British Bake Off, but with
Teutonic efficiency he has finished
cooking them long before I arrive.
So all that is left for me to do is eat
them, while he provides me with
Glühwein, his spectacles steaming
sweetly above his mask.
There are two winners in every series
of Bake Off; the official one, who wows
the judges with their technical skills, and
the person who wins the heart of the
crowd. This year was no exception.
Giuseppe Dell’Anno won the series but it
was the German trombone-enthusiast
Krauss, 56, who puts his bakes into a
spreadsheet and popularised a “power-
ful kneading method called the French
slap”, who conquered our hearts — even
though he was booted out in the semi-
finals (more of which later).
Krauss is still trying to come to terms
with his newfound fame. “I had no
expectation other than staying beyond
the first round,” he says. “I certainly did
not think that I would have 150,000 fol-
lowers on Instagram by the time the show
finished.” Nor was he expecting to
inflame such passion among his fans. He
has had hundreds of direct messages,
saying things like, ‘‘I love you, I love you, I
love you” and “Jürgen must be protected
at all costs”.
To understand why Krauss was such a
hit, you need to understand that Bake Off
is not really about baking at all, but about
the characters who take part. Krauss is
eccentric, authentic and oblivious to his
own charm. He is also a nerd and Bake Off
is a forum in which nerds thrive.
His crowning moment in the tent, for
me at least, was the joconde imprime, an
impossibly complicated French sponge
with a pattern imprinted on the side. His
masterpiece, called Passtyme with Good
Companye, was imprinted with a piece
of music written by Henry VIII as a tribute
to Katharine of Aragon. Not only did
Krauss bake it but he then proceeded to
sing it rather sweetly as the judges tasted
the dessert.
We are meeting in Brighton, at the sea-
side flat that he shares with his wife,
Sophia, and teenage son, Benjamin. They
are all passionate about music — Benja-
min is a music scholar at Lancing College
in West Sussex, which may explain why
the room we’re in looks like it has just
been vacated by a brass band. There are
eight trombones scattered around as well
as nine recorders, two fish tanks and a
rabbit called Humphrey.
Krauss and his son spent lockdown
playing Venetian cantatas on the trom-
bone with a neighbour while Humphrey
listened. “He loves it when we play. He
comes and sits right in the middle,”
Krauss says. But it is baking that has pre-
occupied him for most of the past year.
Krauss grew up in the Black Forest, a
region known for its rich culinary heri-
tage, with influences from Switzerland
and the Alsace region of France. His
father is a master locksmith and his
mother cooked for her two sons because
“takeaways were absolutely unavailable
in Germany at that time”, he says.
It was traditional food of the best qual-
ity. Families commonly bought pigletsJÜRGEN’S
ZIMT-STERNE
STARS
Zimt means cinnamon in
German, and Sterne means
stars. These flourless traditional
Christmas biscuits were my
grandma’s favourite. She liked
the meringue really thick, but
our household preferred a thin
meringue with a thicker,
chewier base. The stars are
quick and easy to make, so my
brother and I enjoyed making
them from an early age. If you
can, use almonds with skin on
and grind them yourself; the
cinnamon stars will get a better
colour and a richer flavour.Ingredients for a baking sheet’s
worth, about 40 starsThe dough
Almonds, ground 250g
Icing sugar 150g
Cinnamon 1 tsp
White of one medium egg
Rum 1 tbspThe meringue
White of one medium egg
Icing sugar 125gMethod
Preheat oven to 165C/150C fan.
To make the dough, mix the dry
ingredients in a bowl. Add egg
white and rum and knead with
your hands until you get a
smooth dough. Divide the
dough into two portions (for
ease of handling). Dust the work
surface with icing sugar.
Roll out a piece of dough to 1cm
thickness and use a medium
star-shaped cookie cutter to cut
out the star shapes. If the
cutters get sticky, dip them in
powdered sugar. Put the stars
on a baking sheet covered with
baking paper or Silpat.
To make the meringue, beat
the egg white to stiff peaks.
Continue beating while adding
the icing sugar bit by bit to form
a thick, creamy consistency.
To finish, paint the stars with
meringue using a brush. Bake
for 10 to 15 minutes. The
meringue should still be white.
Leave to cool on the tray for a
few minutes so they set with a
slightly chewy texture. Keep in
an airtight container, and if you
resist eating them all at once,
they will get better over time!