Last updated at 11:05, Saturday, 19 September 2009

Twice this week I was almost brought to tears: once when I watched a Channel 4 documentary on the great Keith Floyd and saw the condition my food hero had sunk to.

Keith Floyd

The second was on Tuesday, the morning after the programme, when the news broke of Floyd’s death.

The documentary tracked Floyd down to a beautiful house in Avignon and revealed him to be a shambling wreck of a man aged 65 but appearing to be 105.

His mind and tongue were as sharp as ever, the language dreadfully bad, but he looked to be on death’s door.

It was heartbreaking to see what years of too much booze and smoking had done to him and it was no real surprise to learn that he had been diagnosed with bowel cancer.

The programme was filmed in June but on Tuesday it was announced that Floyd had died of a heart attack.

I wish I’d never seen the documentary now.

It was seeing him sloshing about a kitchen, obviously passionate about food, but also having a laugh, making fun of the film crew, whoever he was interviewing and especially, himself, that got me interested in food and how to cook it.

Until his appearance, food was something to fill a hole in my belly, not something to savour and experiment with.

It was also a major revolution to see him acknowledging the production staff.

He made the viewer somehow feel part of his team and you weren’t being lectured to, as other TV food shows did.

And he had The Stranglers as a theme tune!

Apart from the time when he set fire to a ramshackle fishing boat as he cooked on deck, my favourite memory is of him being shown how to cook a stew by an old woman in deepest, darkest France.

She only spat out a few words, all in French, but the gist was: ‘back off and keep out of my way, oaf.’

He giggled, made a half-hearted attempt at commentating on what she was doing and a wholehearted effort at being sarcastic to her.

The show ended with a half-cut (well, almost fully cut) Floyd swigging from a bottle as he watched the village Bastille fireworks.

Why was this shambling, reckless approach inspirational to people he called “fellow gastronauts”?

He made you feel you could do this cooking thing as well: I could make half-decent food and have fun doing it.

Two years ago he appeared in Kendal on his one man cabaret tour of the country (each ticket entitled you to a free glass of red wine), but he made a star appearance at the Linthwaite House Hotel in November 2007 for a series of workshops cleverly titled ‘Floyd’s Cookery Theatre’.

This meant he could tell fans and would-be chefs what to cook and how to do it, while having the odd cheeky slurp and regaling them with the technicolour stories from his life.

It was stressed that the events were more entertainment than cookery school, which summed the man up really.

Hotel co-owner Simon Doddrell said: “He was great! He was outrageous with his language and his stories.

“But people expected it from him and he got away with it because of the charm of the man. He could get away with blue murder.

“It was so popular, we had so many people come to it that we planned another the following year, but his health worsened.

“It is just sad that he had such a tragic private life.”

In all, he starred in 19 worldwide hit TV series on food and his name was on 27 books about food and wine.

But the one I would recommend above all others is his early autobiography Floyd In The Soup which captures his wit, charm and lust for life, without the awful language and without giving away the saddest of endings.

First published at 09:04, Saturday, 19 September 2009
Published by http://www.newsandstar.co.uk