TV review: Saucy Nigella puts the fun into food

BY JANE BOWRON - The Dominion Post

With slim pickings on television during the festive season, the MySky is invaluable, but can we please do without the loud music while planning the programming?

Why anyone would think we want to be subjected to borderline lift music blaring out at full volume while trying to concentrate on recording is beyond comprehension.

The service should come with industrial-strength ear plugs for those of us cursed with defunct mute buttons.

Even if the mute was operating properly, the presumption is that the viewer can't be trusted to find a reasonable sound level on our own initiative, so the sound is loud enough to wake a baby.

I often feel sorry for people who have to work in offices or garages where a commercial radio station, shrieking demented advertisements, plays tyrannically in the background all day long. It must pollute the brain and dull the senses, but I suppose there are many who find silence threatening.

Seriously, when's the last time you heard a pin drop?

When she first arrived on television, I used to like watching British food writer Nigella Lawson lick her spoons with the sound tuned off, because it was like watching a silent movie actress hamming it up.

On Wednesday night, the Queen of Licks, Chews and Swallows was the subject of the Food Channel's Chefography, which focuses on a famous television chef's life.

Chefography is a horrid word made by joining biography and chef together. Thankfully, the History Channel hasn't followed suit and given us Churchillography, Hilterography or Al Caponeography, but I suppose it's just a matter of time.

Apparently, when Nigella was born, she was so small she could only wear dolls' clothes, and she was so painfully shy she was thought to be autistic. Photographs of Nigella's mother show a woman even prettier than Nigella, who died in her 40s of cancer, as did Nigella's sister, who died at 32, and her first husband, who also died of cancer in his 40s.

The grim reaper had cut a swath through her loved ones, but she recovered her equilibrium and went on to become a self-appointed domestic goddess.

When she first used the domestic goddess reference, in the title of her second book, which had a photograph of a cup cake dribbling suggestive white icing, she said she did it with her tongue firmly in her cheek and was surprised when readers thought she was being self- reverential.

The problem was that there was always so much food in those beautiful cheeks that there was scarcely any room for an ironic tongue.

She was also bewildered by claims from viewers and critics that she had become the mistress of food porn, as we watched clips of her snapping her rubber gloves off - "derubbering" as she called it - before biting into something forbidden and delicious and instructing the cameraman: "You'd better leave me to it".

Responsible for giving mastication a bad name, Nigella wasn't just the poster girl "for bosoms and bottoms".

A star at Oxford University, she was made the deputy literary editor of the Sunday Times, wrote a food column for Vogue and was once invited to become a spy for the CIA.

After thinking about it, she turned down their offer, having evaluated herself as "too much of a blabber mouth", but what a blabber mouth. When her husband was dying of cancer, he wrote about the process and a television documentary recorded his four-year battle with the disease.

By the time Nigella got her own show, she felt totally at ease in front of cameras as she ripped chickens apart, spurting out the juices from the flesh as she gorged herself on the "oystery bits" lodged in the soft inner folds of the chook.

Apart from her cooking talents, Nigella has probably made the British more relaxed about eating in public. For years, we have seen Americans chowing down and putting the nose bag on, scoffing up large on Chinese takeaways and hot dogs, while the British have held back, imagining that the intake of food is a vulgar event and should be done in private.

Blessed with a lovely mouth and flirty eyes, Nigella, with her literary background, sauced up the food lingo and devoured food in close-ups that would have had Fatty Arbuckle, if he had survived popular fiction, fainting dead away.

Nigella isn't so much a porn food queen as a food comedian.

Good on her for getting an angle, gripping it with both hands and finding an audience to scoff it down in front of wholesale.

* What do you think of Nigella Lawson? Post your comments below.