Peeling Back Pretension
The Age
Thursday March 11, 2004
ACCORDING to the gospel as prescribed by television chefs Simon and Minty Marchmont, cooks who use stock cubes have low self-esteem, mums who buy their children a birthday cake instead of baking one themselves are not worthy of being a parent, and only happy hens, those that ``don't have those awful Cliff Richard necks", should be used by any self-respecting home cook.
It may have taken a while, but the arrival of Simon and Minty in the spoof Posh Nosh signals an auspicious turning point in the evolution of the ubiquitous television cooking show. It's that moment where the more absurd and ridiculous elements of the genre are catalogued and inspected, analysed and mercilessly pilloried.
Fast Show alumnus Arabella Weir, who also created and co-wrote Posh Nosh, and the inimitable Richard E. Grant, play the snobby Minty and her mincing, upper-class tosser of a husband, Simon. The pair portray the appalling wannabe celeb-chef couple (more on that later) as straight and deadpan as undertakers - director Chris Langham, who was previously responsible for the mockumentary series People Like Us, is once again peeling back the absurd in the everyday.
For Weir, the idea hatched, naturally enough, watching the many British cooking shows.
``I was thinking it can't be that everyone is taking this seriously - cookery shows saying, `If you're serious about this you must get the cod in Sardinia' - ridiculous things like that," she says.
``I thought it would be good to make someone who is a comically extended version of that, because they're pretending that what they're doing is teaching you to make a risotto but what they're really saying is, `I'm a better cook than you, and look at me with my great life and my Aga (a Swedish stove) and my #100,000 kitchen.'
``They're pretending to include people, but in fact those shows don't, they're saying, `Look at me and my great life.' "
Posh Nosh parodies the format of cooking shows - ``you're switching on Delia to find out how to make a summer pudding but because she has to fill the airtime while she's cooking, she's telling you about her life and her owning a football club", Weir says - and the specific lexicon it has spawned. Minty has developed her own glossary of cooking terms, such as ``embarrassing" (peeling), ``annoying in stock" (simmering) and ``disappointing" (draining) vegetables, ``Matissing the oil" and ``ashaming the fish" by removing its skin. For his part, the toffee-nosed Simon reveals his dislike for children, women and the lower classes, dismissing one virgin olive oil as a ``vile little hussy", praising another as ``a real Britney".
But possibly the biggest part of the drier-than-dry comedy of Posh Nosh centres on the social aspirations and dysfunctional marriage of Simon and Minty. Weir describes Minty as an unremarkable, lower-middle-class woman who is prepared to put up with any amount of misery to be a posh guy's wife and rise above her station in life. ``Via him, she's earned the right to be snobby about food and people, and of course she's a terrible name-dropper, the Duke of Marlborough this, Elton John that. But she can't believe her luck. You see a lot of women in these marriages, and sometimes men, and you think they can't want to be in that marriage.
``For him, she's some kind of live-in nanny and cook factotum. He couldn't care less about her, he needs someone to do the donkey work."
As for Minty acknowledging Simon's homosexuality, that's an absolute no-no, says Weir. ``There's a bit where she goes on about him playing tennis all the time with his tennis coach and says, `Well, boys will be boys.' If someone said they're at it like rabbits and are not really on the tennis court, she'd say don't be ridiculous, that's what boys are like. If she acknowledged it, she'd have to end the marriage."
The idea of casting Grant jelled while Weir and co-writer Jon Canter were writing the script. He agreed from the beginning to be in it, but when film commitments threatened Grant's availability, Weir was unable to think of anyone else to fill Simon's shoes.
``What's so great about Richard is that he's heterosexual but he embodies that very oblique, foppish thing and is very comfortable with it. I think if we'd had someone who was openly homosexual, it wouldn't have been as interesting. A gay person would have made Minty look ridiculously stupid, whereas now she just looks blocked and unhappy."
Viewers shouldn't come to Posh Nosh expecting to see caricatures of recognisable cooking show identities. Minty, she insists, isn't based on a specific celebrity chef.
``She's a generic parody of a bland woman on British television, of which there are legion," she says, with the same kind of wicked bite that is stamped all over this timely reminder of a television fad whose moment, this reminds us, may have come.
Posh Nosh premieres on Friday at 10.15pm on the ABC.
© 2004 The Age
