Twenty-five years on, Daniel Bettridge looks back at how Jamie Oliver’s The Naked Chef changed everything when it came to cooking on telly.
Chef, restaurateur, social campaigner and sworn enemy of the Turkey Twizzler – these days Jamie Oliver needs no introduction. But it was an altogether different story when he made his TV debut 25 years ago.
On Wednesday 14th April 1999, The Naked Chef exploded onto our screens. The show introduced us to a then-unknown Oliver, a shaggy-haired sous chef from London’s River Cafe who whizzed around London on his Vespa before cooking up a feast for his friends at the swanky Islington apartment where the series was filmed.
With a format that was as fresh as his food, The Naked Chef was unlike anything we’d ever seen on TV before. An overnight hit, it didn’t just launch Oliver’s career but changed the face of small-screen cuisine – shaping the way that TV chefs (and indeed an entire nation) cooked forever.
“Cooking has got to be a laugh”
A quarter of a century ago, the recipe for TV cooking was almost unrecognisable from the kind of shows we see today.
Back then the format felt as stiff as the starched white aprons worn by the chefs who stood behind the stove. Pre-measured ingredients in little glass ramekins were put together with almost scientific precision, as impeccably-spoken hosts guided us through elaborate processes used to prepare pretentious dishes that would be out of place in all but a handful of households.
Oliver however existed at the opposite end of the chef spectrum. The brand of slapdash simplicity that gave the show its “Naked” moniker stripped food back to basics, delivering big flavour with minimal effort. It was also fun, every bit the laugh that Oliver said it had to be during the show’s opening credits.
Gone were the time-consuming techniques and precision measurements – instead Oliver “dolloped”, “shoved”, “smashed” and “chuffed up” his ingredients, guiding viewers through “pukka” recipes with a distinctive Essex patter that was more Del Boy than Delia Smith. He looked and sounded like someone you might know in real life, which only added to the feeling that these were delicious dishes you actually stood a chance of recreating at home.
Fresh format
It wasn’t just Oliver who was different, The Naked Chef’s format also provided a fresh take on proceedings.
Shot in an eye-catching London pad, Oliver bounced around the kitchen, dropping ingredients and slapping pots and pans down on hobs with reckless abandon, before sliding down the bannister of a spiral staircase to open the door to guests.
He didn’t stare down the barrel of the camera like other TV chefs, instead he chatted with the off-screen figure of Patricia Llewellyn, the late great BBC producer who’d first discovered him. The conversational style was supposedly a tactic used to overcome Oliver’s on-screen nerves, but it had the added effect of enhancing the relaxed informal style that made The Naked Chef so appealing.
That wasn’t the only innovation the show served up, however. Handheld camerawork combined with creatively framed close-ups and rapid-fire edits echoed Oliver’s on-screen energy. And as the dishes sizzled and sautéed in front of us, the audio followed suit, setting the show to a soundtrack of late nineties indie hits from the likes of Inspiral Carpets, The Stone Roses and Toploader. This was music to cook to, and proved so popular that it was even released as an accompanying CD.
The overriding impact made it feel more like a movie than a cooking show. It was kinetic, it was exciting and above all, it was cool.
Cooking became cool
Perhaps that’s The Naked Chef’s greatest achievement. Before the show arrived on our screens, cooking was something your mum did or it involved stuffy chefs preparing stuffy dishes for equally stuffy dinner parties. But Oliver and co made food fun.
They took home-cooking out of the kitchen and made it a part of the late nineties lifestyle. From hangover breakfasts with your friends to post-gig grub with your beer-drinking bandmates – The Naked Chef made food the fulcrum around which Oliver’s aspirational social circle orbited.
Chefs were the new rockstars and Oliver’s overnight stardom would usher in a new generation of celebrity cooks onto our screens. It would also change the way that Britain cooked, how we shopped and how TV was made. Looking back now, it’s clear that The Naked Chef still provides the raw ingredients from which the recipe for TV cooking is constructed, its influence as fresh today as it was when it first hit our screens 25 years ago.
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