But what do I know? I haven't seen him for years and perhaps I never knew him anyway, though I thought I did. Wallingford seems a bit genteel, a bit prissy, for him. Why Wallingford, I wonder, given that he now lives in Spain with his fourth wife, Tess? I know he hates London but his roots are in the west country - Somerset where he grew up, or Bristol where he had his bistros in the Sixties and Seventies, or Devon where he had his ill-starred pub in the Nineties. But here in Britain he's been eclipsed by the Nigellas and Jamie Olivers (whom Floyd has never seen because he doesn't watch television), dropped from the BBC and banished to the wastelands of Channel 5.Īnd yet the call comes - do I want to interview Keith Floyd? - and off I go, flogging down the M40 to Wallingford on Thames. Whenever you are stuck in some far corner of a foreign hotel-hole you can almost certainly catch Floyd on cable.
But now his programmes look like tourist-board ads - on Capital Floyd in Vienna he actually cooked a Sacher Torte.
Floyd was cooking on camping stoves, on pitching boats at sea. Does anyone now remember how cutting-edge Floyd seemed when he started? Up till then television cookery consisted of some queen in a studio kitchen saying 'Here's one I made earlier'. And his eyes seem to have disappeared for good - they always used to disappear when he smiled, but now they don't come back.īut that's not really the problem - it's his programmes. W hy do I still carry a torch for Keith Floyd when he's such a seedy old thing? 'He used to be really gorgeous,' I told my daughters when they caught me secretly watching his last series, Capital Floyd, but they laughed and said 'don't be silly, mum - he's bald.' Well, yes, bald I concede - he was already thinning when he started on television and now he's down to one hair in front.
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