Are TV chefs out of season?

Celebrity cooks and primetime television go together like bacon and eggs, so why is food programming down 40%? Andrew Turvil believes social media is where it's all cooking

- Andrew Turvil

So, who was your first celebrity chef crush? Who did you gaze at with slack jaw and wide eyes as they performed on television or social media? Who made you swoon and shout at the screen: “I want to eat that right now!” Who made you hungry for more? Mine was Keith Floyd in the 1980s.

Food programming had never seemed quite so cool and messy. He made cooking and eating seem like an act of visceral, hedonistic, unadulterated pleasure, and the chaos of it all was joyful to behold (chaos relative to what had gone before, anyway).

And then, when Marco Pierre White published White Heat in 1990, well, things would never be quite the same again. In my new book, Blood, Sweat and Asparagus Spears, I explore how the 1990s saw chefs emerge through the swing doors out of the kitchen and into the maelstrom of mainstream media attention for pretty much the very first time.

Sure, we'd had Fanny Cradock on our TV screens, Philip Harben, a posh American chap called Robert Carrier and the Galloping Gourmet Graham Kerr, but the 1990s saw a full-flavoured boom in new TV programming and cookbooks started flying off the shelves like loaves from a baker's oven.

The 1990s were the start of the decade of the “celebrity chef”, which gathered pace into the new century. The chefs themselves were the stars for the first time. But with the fast-changing media landscape we have today, is the love affair over?

Public relations guru Alan Crompton-Batt is usually credited as the godfather of celebrity chefs in this country, but it wasn't a mantle he wanted to carry, or actually deserved. He had certainly helped shine a light on chefs such as Nico Ladenis and White, but Crompton-Batt's focus was never on getting his clients gigs on light entertainment TV shows. The Likes of Nico and Marco fostered an edginess, a soupçon of danger, and you'd better not ask for salt or your steak to be well done!