The Daily Express Saturday Magazine – 21st December, 2002

If you’ve ever wondered how to waltz butter, relax an avocado, caution egg yolks, humiliate bread or embarrass some baby parsnips, then Posh Nosh, by Arabella Weir and Jon Canter, is the show for you, writes Jane Dudley.

Born out of a complete apathy to today’s cookery programmes, Posh Nosh takes a peek into the ives of the 21st century’s Fanny and Johnny Craddock, in the shape of Minty and Simon Marchmont. Arabella Weir plays the matron-like Minty and Richard E Grant plays her effeminate husband, Simon, who has a very special relationship with his [male] tennis coach. Each week, Minty and Simon prepare a mouth-watering recipe from their lovely country kitchen using their state-of-the-art Aga, while bickering and bitching along the way.

“All that the plethora of cookery shows really does is serve to make me feel insecure,” says Arabella, who knows what she’s talking about, having invented and played Insecure Woman (aka Does My Bum Look Big In This?) in The Fast Show (which recently toured the UK) since 1994.“They don’t make me think,‘Oh, what a great thing to do with scallops and chives,’ I just think, ‘Oh God! I’m just a fat oaf who lives in a horrible kitchen!’

“Mine and Jon Canter’s theory was that lifestyle shows in general – particularly the cookery ones – are only made by people who want you to envy them.They don’t actually want to teach you anything, they want you to think,‘Oh, look at that perfect life. I bet her and her husband never argue, I bet it’s just great at their house because she knows what to do with crème frâiche.’

“The other inspiration was in the back of the River Café book. There’s things like, ‘If you’re serious about making this you’ll get your chestnuts fresh from France,’ so now, I’m not serious because I’m trying to make a recipe with vacuum-packed chestnuts from Sainsbury’s. It’s like they’re saying, ‘Well, if you think that’s okay, then do it.’”

Minty Marchmont is desperate to be an upper-class society woman and is happy to be seen as little more than a nanny to husband Simon, not least of all because his mother was a titled woman. He continually corrects Minty’s kitchen faux pas, such as using the wrong colander, or pronouncing the wine incorrectly but, as long as they can share their love of “poncey” food, Minty can turn a blind eye to Simon’s little foibles – including his obvious homosexuality.

“The idea of Simon being gay further accentuates the fact that here’s a woman who’s desperately trying to pretend her life is perfect,” says Arabella. “She’s got an Aga and she’s married to a posh man, so let’s not worry about his sexuality! “Of course she realises it but she’s just completely blocking it, because to realise it means she’s got to confront it, like an addiction. Like anybody with low self esteem, she thinks he’s always right because she doesn’t have enough self worth,” says Arabella, whose first novel, Does My Bum Look Big In This?, was one of the best-selling chick-lit books of the Nineties.

“You’re supposed to feel sorry for Minty, but the way you mitigate that so that it’s not a show about a horrible monster and a downtrodden woman, is to remember that she’s a desperate snob who never stops dropping the fact that his mother’s a Lady, and that they’ve got a Bishop coming to supper.That’s her trade off – she’s married a posh bloke that she would never have ordinarily got hold of.

“The main thing is that they share a commitment to poncey food and a belief that that’s the only thing that’s important in life. There’s one line where Minty says, ‘We make our own stock, but do buy stock cubes if you have low self-esteem.’That’s what Simon and Minty share and he’s one of those characters of which I’ve seen plenty in real life. “You kind of think,‘What’s a gorgeous thing like you doing going around with that dumpy old cow?’ He’ll say, ‘I need a cook, I need someone to clean up and I might need someone to have children with.’

At one point, Simon introduces Minty to someone and says, ‘You remember Matron, don’t you?’ and that’s the sort of thing that poncey public schoolboys say!” Simon is the wine expert of the couple and, says Arabella, every wine description used in the series is actually real.“We made up the name of the wine but everything else is verbatim from the internet.You literally sit there howling with laughter – they say things like,‘It’s got notes of old egg, plastic and rope,’ and you think,‘Well why would anybody want to drink it?’

“The food stuff is just a basic food recipe that we’ve made a bit more bonkers! We just wanted it to be really surreal. My favourite introduction from Minty is,‘Welcome to Posh Nosh – extraordinary food for ordinary people!’ and that says it all really.”

Arabella, who first met co-star Richard E Grant 18 years ago, when they both appeared in the Les Blair film, Honest, Decent And True for the BBC, says she only ever had Richard in mind when she wrote the part of Simon: “Right from the beginning we wanted Richard because he is so completely Simon! At one point we thought he may not be able to do it as our recording dates clashed with a film he was making and we sat there thinking,‘What on earth are we going to do?’

“We were very clear that it couldn’t be an actor who was openly gay because the audience would know all along. With Richard, you just get an air of being gay. He’s just completely perfect for the part.”

Despite Posh Nosh being an obvious sendup of all the TV chefs, Arabella does have “enormous and genuine admiration for people who can cook” and says that she thinks Posh Nosh came out of envy. “I’d love to be able to go, ‘just throw the spaghetti in and some coriander and there you have it,’ but it’s just not me. One of my closest friends is Italian and says,‘Oh, I’ll just see what I’ve got in the fridge,’ and it’s always something you’d pay a fortune for in Soho! “All of the TV shows just make me feel insufficient so I don’t watch them. I don’t really like anybody who’s on TV saying, ‘Look at my great life and all the marvellous things I’m able to do that you can’t, but if you concentrate very hard on my shows, watch all my videos and buy all the books, then you might just be able to throw something together that resembles it.”