My Dad worked as a BBC sound man and was there at the very beginning of the “celebrity chef” era

When we lived in London, he worked at Television Centre, where he worked with Fanny Cradock, one of the very first TV chefs

The BBC even published a small pamphlet of her recipes back then

Fast forward to this Christmas and a walk into Waterstones, and there’s a huge section devoted to cookery books

You’ll also find plenty of them lining the shelves of charity shops

Food on television didn’t just change how we cooked, it created an entire industry

Dad also worked with Keith Floyd, the television chef whose trademark was cooking while drinking red wine

Dad used to say the production team knew there was a very specific time window to get the takes they needed, before Keith’s speech started to slur

Timing, as it turned out, mattered in more ways than one

Through his work with the Asian TV unit at the BBC in Birmingham, Dad worked for many years with Madhur Jaffrey

It was Madhur Jaffrey who introduced us to real Indian food, not the sort you get from the takeaway

Food culture has changed enormously since then

I remember having to actively search for coriander

Living in Coventry at the time, I could get it up the Foleshill Road

Today, you can buy it in any supermarket without a second thought

If I recall correctly, it was a Madhur Jaffrey recipe my Mum cooked for Dad the day before we took him into the nursing home

Dad was given six months when he went in

He stayed for five and a half years

I remember taking him at the nursing home about an article about tape recorders

By then he had no short-term or long-term memory

We were sitting together, reading it, and he suddenly pointed at a photo and said, “That’s a Studer A80 tape recorder.”

You could take Dad out of the recording studio, but you could never take the recording studio out of my Dad

Conclusion
Food, television, memory, and craft all moved on, but some things stayed hardwired

Long after names, dates, and conversations faded, the tools of his trade were still there

It reminded me that what we truly love, what we spend a lifetime mastering, leaves a deeper imprint than we often realise