It was the eyerolls to the camera that did it. Although the exaggerated shaking of the head, mock retching and plummy-toned exclamations didn’t help.
“A seafood cocktail straight into the duck ?,” winced Fanny Cradock. “Dear God!” As for the proposed blackberry jam…. “Bramble jelly?,” she sneered, with a liberal dollop of upper middle class disdain. “It’s for melting down and brushing flans, my love! You’re with the professionals now.”
This was Fanny – the UK’s first celebrity chef – all summed up in one disastrous two minutes of television: Over-the-top, unapologetic and blunt to a fault. She was giving viewers the full Fanny experience: the extravagant ballgowns, the decadent make-up and the tongue, sharper than a grapefruit (dipped in vinegar).
But what Fanny failed to realise was that on this particular occasion – BBC’s The Big Time in 1976 – she was going too far. Before her sat the unassuming Devonshire farmer’s wife Gwen Troake, an amateur cook who had won the chance to create a banquet – with the ‘help’ of her TV heroine.
But instead 10 million viewers watched humble Gwen crumble – her confidence collapsing like a burst souffle….and smirking Fanny was the one with the fork. “It was Cruella de Vil meets Bambi,” the show’s host Dame Esther Rantzen would later say.
It was 70 years ago in February that Fanny landed her first BBC cookery show and defined a whole new genre of entertainment. There had been chefs on TV before, but no one had done it like her – extravagant food, lots of personality, feminist undertones, a whole ‘Bon Viveur’ brand and recipes that didn’t break the bank.
For 20 years she kept her series – under various titles. But it would end – 50 years ago this year – with the 1975 Christmas Special. No one knew it at the time, but within two weeks of ‘The Big Time’ PR disaster, the BBC severed Fanny’s contract, and she never made her next series.
It was the most extraordinary end of an era. But nothing had ever been ordinary about game-changing Fanny. Born in 1909 to an 18-year-old mother, Phyllis Nan Sortain Pechey was dropped off at her wealthy grandparents’ home in Leytonstone, east London, as a baby and stayed there until boarding school aged 10.
Her grandmother Emily and grandfather, Charles, a retired surgeon-major, had an unusual approach: She was given ballet and violin tutors before she was five and made to translate the newspaper opinion column into French and German every morning.
“Fanny’s grandmother introduced her to colour-themed cookery, as well as the self-sufficient joys of bottling, potting, pickling and preserving,” explains biographer Clive Ellis in his book Fabulous Fanny Cradock. “And her grandfather inadvertently fostered her love of cigars – she was rewarded with a weekly puff after filling his pipe – and an early appreciation of the grape.”
Fanny once quipped: “My wine was pale pink at five, deep pink by eight and often straight from the bottle by the time I went to school.” Her skills also teetered on the macabre: “She claimed to have a hotline to the court of Louis XIV of France and played levitation games,” says Ellis.
Later in life she refused royalties for a novel because a “nine million-year-old priest” had given her the idea. Boarding school was not a good fit. “I learned nothing, forgot all I knew and hourly hoped to die,” was Fanny’s withering verdict. The feeling was mutual. The school tried to expel her for holding seances.
The peculiarities of her early years were nothing compared to her turbulent lovelife. Marrying an RAF pilot aged 17, four months later she was widowed and expecting. She’d been told she was pregnant on a Wednesday, his plane crashed in a freak bout of fog on the Sunday.
Fanny gave birth, shipped son Peter off to his paternal grandparents and was not reunited with him until he was 21. Next, she married Arthur Chapman, had a second child, Christopher, but left them both a year later.
Chapman converted to Catholicism and refused to divorce, but around nine years later, she met racing driver Gregory Holden-Dye. And, after getting no response from their wedding banns, presumed Arthur was dead.
That ‘marriage’ lasted eight weeks, as she then met the love of her life, her faithful Bon Viveur sidekick, who she stayed with for decades – Army Major Johnnie Cradock.
“The only things which keep us apart are rugby and the lavatory,” Fanny once said. It was 1954 when Greg, wanting to remarry, wrote to her enquiring about their divorce.
“Don’t worry. Everything’s all right,” she wrote back. “I met Arthur in London. He’s still alive so our marriage was null and void.” Her casual admission of bigamy came without emotion.
Fast forward to 1977 and she did it again. Johnnie spotted a death notice for Arthur Chapman in the newspaper so the pair got hitched (both knocking 10 years off their age on the certificate). But two years later, they realised another Arthur Chapman had died!
But, in the public’s minds, Fanny and Johnnie were a bonafide national treasure double act. Fanny’s ascent to queen of TV chefs began when, in 1949, she released a cookbook, which led to a food column in The Telegraph, Bon Viveur.
It proved so popular, Fanny and Johnnie began to do live ‘Kitchen Magic’ cookery demonstrations, under the Bon Viveur brand, sponsored by the gas board. Billed as “the only stage cookery show in the world”, Fanny would pretentiously slip into French to rave about the famous chef Auguste Escoffier, while dishing up the likes of dyed green potatoes and baked hedgehog – wearing a ballgown and no apron. “Only a slut gets in a mess in the kitchen!”, she once said.
Johnnie was her helper, the poor “put-upon husband”. The crowds ate it up. They could sell out The Royal Albert Hall, and over the years entertained The late Queen, Prince Phillip, The Queen Mother and Elizabeth Taylor.
Fanny would later insist the harridan schtick was just an act. Assistant Peter Botterill, who was with her one fateful night in Edinburgh, disagreed.
“The poor old lighting man..she tore him off a strip really quite badly,” he wrote. “He collapsed and had a minor heart attack. He was carried off to hospital and all she said was, ‘Get somebody else quickly. We’ve got to get the show on tonight.’”
Despite her caustic manner, Fanny and Johnnie’s fame landed them a late night show on the BBC in February 1955. It was an instant hit.
“There were ‘several hundred’ letters,” says Ellis. “One woman wrote: ‘Your demonstration on TV was superb and was responsible for two big decisions in my life – A, to keep my TV set after all – B, to go right out and buy a 10” x 14” tin and have a go.’ “
It was the beginning of their new era. Whether it was preparing a goose with garden secateurs or teaching Johnnie four types of souffles, for the next 20 years the TV viewers couldn’t get enough.
In 1968 their shows went full colour. And – oft to the BBC’s wrath – they were also making a fortune with endorsement deals, everything from Fairy Liquid to new fridges.
“Transposed to the present day, she would be competing for the Ramsay millions,” explains Ellis. “And she would be more plain-speaking and outrageous than Anne Robinson and Simon Cowell combined.”
But times and tastes were already changing, when some 600 people wrote in to complain about her treatment of Gwen Troake. “Fanny was condemned as self-centred, condescending, insulting, patronising, rude, tactless, pathetic and offensive,” explains Ellis.
So Fanny was “cancelled” and Troake was given a cookbook deal. It wasn’t the end for Bon Viveur though. Fanny and Johnnie had fingers in multiple pies, and busied themselves moving in and out of the country before settling near Colchester.
Their home was as madcap as they were. They raised 89 bunnies from one single doe and were in a long-standing feud with all cleaning appliances. Assistant Wendy Colvin remembers a rotten ham in their fridge, crawling with maggots.
She suggested they threw it away. “Fanny said, ‘Nonsense darling, nobody ever died from eating maggots. Boil it up and it’ll be delicious’,” Wendy recalled. “’I wouldn’t eat it, but she and Johnnie did.”
By the 80s, the simple modern cooking of Delia Smith had overtaken Fanny’s theatrical approach. But it was 1987 and the death of Johnnie – aged 83 from lung cancer – that saw the real end of brand Bon Viveur. Fanny lost her way, refused to see him in hospital, shunned the funeral and hid away.
Near her own end – aged 85 in 1994 – she admitted: “I think I should have been more dignified. “I would have more friends now if I had been more restrained.”
Britain however is conflicted. Looking back, we loved her just the way she was. TV chef Anthony Worrall-Thompson was seven when he first met her on set. His mum was her stage manager.
“Her opening words were: ‘Who does this ugly little runt belong to?’,” he remembers. “I thought she was a witch, a very scary witch.” And yet….
“She inspired me to cook,” he adds. Dame Esther Rantzen added: “In a notoriously bad-tempered profession, her rages were legendary..But I remain a Fanny fan. That glorious unpredictable burst of rage was genuine – in a world of retakes and fakery, she lit up the screen.”
Some 70 years on from that first TV show, and with Fanny’s clips now shared on TikTok, the world would seem to agree.
Fabulous Fanny Cradock: TV’s Outrageous Queen of Cuisine by Clive Ellis is published by The History Press
