Description

Book Synopsis

While Fanny Cradock cut a controversial figure – berating Margaret Thatcher for wearing ‘cheap shoes and clothes’, writing off Eamonn Andrews as a ‘blundering amateur’ and famously being forced to apologise for insulting a housewife cook on The Big Time – her cookery programmes were enormously popular.

Dressed in evening gown, drop earrings and pearls, donning thick make-up, she boomed orders to her partner Johnnie, a gentle, monocled stooge who was portrayed as an amiable drunk. The programmes were watched by millions and were hugely influential: the Queen Mother told Fanny that she and Johnnie were ‘mainly responsible’ for the improvement in catering standards since the war; Keith Floyd declared that ‘she changed the whole nation’s cooking attitudes’; for Esther Rantzen ‘she created the cult of the TV chef’.

Lavishly illustrated and illuminated by amusing facts and anecdotes, Fabulous Fanny Cradock paints a fun, entertaining portrait of this extraordinary woman.

Fabulous Fanny Cradock: TV's Outrageous Queen of

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    A Paperback / softback by Clive Ellis, Antony Worrall Thompson

    2 in stock

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      View other formats and editions of Fabulous Fanny Cradock: TV's Outrageous Queen of by Clive Ellis

      Publisher: The History Press Ltd
      Publication Date: 16/11/2023
      ISBN13: 9781803995328, 978-1803995328
      ISBN10: 1803995327

      Description

      Book Synopsis

      While Fanny Cradock cut a controversial figure – berating Margaret Thatcher for wearing ‘cheap shoes and clothes’, writing off Eamonn Andrews as a ‘blundering amateur’ and famously being forced to apologise for insulting a housewife cook on The Big Time – her cookery programmes were enormously popular.

      Dressed in evening gown, drop earrings and pearls, donning thick make-up, she boomed orders to her partner Johnnie, a gentle, monocled stooge who was portrayed as an amiable drunk. The programmes were watched by millions and were hugely influential: the Queen Mother told Fanny that she and Johnnie were ‘mainly responsible’ for the improvement in catering standards since the war; Keith Floyd declared that ‘she changed the whole nation’s cooking attitudes’; for Esther Rantzen ‘she created the cult of the TV chef’.

      Lavishly illustrated and illuminated by amusing facts and anecdotes, Fabulous Fanny Cradock paints a fun, entertaining portrait of this extraordinary woman.

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