Robin Jarvis

In 1996 the BBC put two large women on a motorbike and sidecar, sent them round Britain cooking with lard, cream and butter by the block, and twelve million people a week sat down to watch them refuse to apologise for it. Jennifer Paterson was sixty-eight, a Catholic who had cooked for the staff of The Spectator and been sacked for throwing the crockery out of the window. Clarissa Dickson Wright was a barrister who had drunk her way through a fortune and come out the other side. Neither had been on television. Both had been told all their lives that the way they ate was going to kill them, and both had decided they would rather be fat and fed than thin and lied to. If you watched it you remember the sound of it. Jennifer scraping an entire pack of butter into a pan while talking about the war. Clarissa holding up a lump of suet to the camera and saying the word with relish. Game pie, kidneys in cream, bacon fat poured over cabbage, a pudding made with a pound of dripping. They cooked for monks, for lifeboatmen, for the Women's Institute, in country-house kitchens with the Aga going. And every episode had a moment where one of them turned to the lens and said what nobody else on television would. Low fat was a fraud. Margarine was a chemical. Vegetarianism was for people with something wrong with them. Clarissa said if God had not meant us to eat animals he would not have made them out of meat. It went out in forty countries. The BBC had expected a curiosity and got the most watched cooking programme it had ever made. Jennifer died in 1999, of lung cancer, with a tin of caviar on the bedside table that she had asked for. Clarissa went in 2014 at sixty-six, having spent her last years defending the butcher, the gamekeeper and the dairy farmer against a country that had forgotten what they were for. They were never right about everything. They were right about the one thing the nation was being lied to about, and they said it with a sidecar and a block of butter in front of twelve million people at a time when every other cook on television was holding up a tub of spread.