It's Not Easy

(Note: Another reworked missive from the Wayback Machine — 2013)

“The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men gang aft agley”

Robert Burns

For a recent episode of my current show, our producers hired a celebrity television chef to appear in a guest role, one of many who’ve made buckets of money the last few years by turning their culinary skills into lively, intense, and often confrontational cooking shows.

First, a brief digression: I’ve been a fan of cooking shows since way back in the day — everyone from Julia Child to Jacque Pepin to The Frugal Gourmet — but my all-time favorite is the wonderfully cheeky British chef Keith Floyd, who was never happier than while demonstrating the art of cooking on camera, be it over a crude wood stove in the European countryside or the fully equipped kitchen of a high-end French culinary school.* Floyd’s passionate but refreshingly down-to-earth approach, usually with a glass of wine in one hand, thoroughly demystified the process of cooking. He introduced one memorable show by talking into the camera — which was in the passenger seat of a car — while barreling through the French countryside with Floyd at the wheel, rarely looking at the road ahead, talking and drinking all the way.

Apologies for the lousy quality of this screenshot - from the documentary - of Keith Floyd careening through France while talking to the camera.

Adding to the this-not-your-mother’s-cooking-show credentials was Floyd’s affectionate reference to his television audience as “gastronauts,” and a fondness for the music of The Stranglers, which graced the soundtrack of the show.**

This delightful forty minute documentary explores the groundbreaking inventiveness and comedic culinary brilliance of Keith Floyd: it’s definitely worth your time.

Pause for another slight digression: The stats for the last few offerings here at BS&T reveal that roughly half of the 325 subscribers look at each post, with roughly five percent (at most) clicking on one of the links therein. I get it — we’re all busy, and who’s got time to fall down the rabbit hole of following links — but I urge you to at least take a look at that Keith Floyd documentary. Yes, it’s 40 minutes long, so you’re not gonna watch now — but just cut and paste the URL into a text file, then tune in when you have the time. Seriously, it’s a blast.

Enough digressions: we now return to our regularly scheduled program.

Although I still watch a few cooking programs these days (none of which reach the high bar set by Keith Floyd), I’ve no interest in the scream-and-shout shows that typically feature a loud bully strutting around the kitchen abusing his acolytes like an epicurian Mussolini … which is probably why I’d never heard of our guest-star celebrity chef.

Many on our the crew had, though, and for them, having this guy on set was a big deal. Given that he’d done so many high-pressure television shows, casting him to portray a pompous, arrogant chef who runs the best and most expensive restaurant in town must have seemed a stroke of genius to our show runners.

But many a late-night inspiration in the writer’s room collapses like a sad soufflé in the journey from script to screen, and perhaps this particular notion should have spent a bit more time in the oven before placing a call to the chef’s agent. Despite pacing the kitchen set alone for a good three hours, script in hand, diligently rehearsing his lines — or perhaps because of all that over-preparation — the poor guy morphed into a proverbial deer in the headlights when our actors and all four cameras finally rolled in. He continually forgot or fumbled his lines, and on those rare moments when the proper words were summoned, they weren’t delivered with any real authority — and this from a man accustomed to barking orders in a kitchen like a Marine Corps drill instructor. A quick scene that should have taken no more than fifteen minutes to shoot stretched out like salt water taffy, and for him — for all of us, really — it was one tortuously painfully hour. I felt bad for the guy, but had to give him credit for soldiering all the way through to the the bitter, humiliating end.

It wasn’t a complete disaster — we shot enough takes from various angles for the editors to cobble together a usable scene — but once again I was reminded exactly why actors get paid a lot of money: most people can’t do what they do. Acting is hard, which is just one more reason I’ve always been quite happy to remain well behind the lights and cameras.

I hope our show runners learned their lesson and think twice the next time somebody suggests hiring a non-actor for a role in the show. Just because something looks easy — which good actors do on set every day — doesn’t mean it actually is.

On the bright side, there’s at least one celebrity chef out there who has a new appreciation for what a real actor can do.

* Sadly, he passed away in 2009 at age 65. RIP, Keith, and thanks for the laughs.

** If nothing else, The Stranglers are memorable for Golden Brown, the best heroin song ever.