Television
A touch of Tabasco
Martyn Harris
he tyrannical chef is a classic Eighties figure, combining fear and greed, indul- gence and puritanism, huge prices and tiny helpings, but it has taken until the 1990s to turn him into fiction. Lenny Henry's cre- ation of Gareth Blackstock in Chef! (BBC 1, Thursday, 9.30 p.m.) is a wonderfully skilful combination of Basil Fawlty with Nico Ladenis, Marco Pierre White and every other jumped-up carrot-chopper who learned to pull the levers of that low, dis- honest decade: to make a customer cringe and a commis crawl.
`Could I have some salt, please?' asks an innocent diner of the passing Blackstock, and it is the spark to a 50-foot trail of gun- powder: 'Nothing else you wanted, was there?' asks the chef. 'A splash of Lea and Perrins? Perhaps a dollop of Daddies to stir into the artichoke and hollandaise coupe . . . salad cream, Branston pickle, a little Tabasco — or barbecue sauce? A spoonful of sandwich spread, maybe, or a nice packet of cheese and onion crisps . . . I mean we don't mind going to a bit of trou- ble to please the customer, really.,SALT!'
This is the well-tuned ear of a very good writer you are hearing: in this case Peter Tilbury, who worked on the early series of Shelley, which deployed a similar high- octane invective. There has been a lot of money and care spent on this programme: the quality of the writing; the opulent sets; the use of film instead of videotape, and a solid cast of actors which includes the deli- cious Caroline Lee Johnson as Blackstock's wife, with Claire Skinner and Roger Grif- fiths among the underlings. It is, neverthe- less, a star vehicle, conceived by Lenny Henry himself, who is great as Blackstock when he is nasty, less satisfactory when nice, as when in the first episode he is too soft to sack a hopeless scullion. The follow- up series, which must be a certainty, should avoid the temptation to give Blackstoek a heart of gold. There was absolutely nothing to like about Basil Fawlty, and you loved him for it. The regular moan about the decline of the British sitcom seems more absurd than ever at the moment, with Chef!, One Fo°1 in the Grave and the new series of Drop the Dead Donkey, which continues to Pull off the miracle of topical storyline and P' ished dialogue week after week. Last week' with a nod to Major v. the New Statesman, it was libel, with airhead presenter SOY Smedley suing a Fleet Street squaloid for suggesting she was less than adored by her colleagues. Woven into this were a half a dozen competing themes plucked from we newsroom crossfire as, for instance, when Helen the news editor is leafing through the news list: 'I don't believe this,' she says; `British Rail is going to tie people to wood en posts next to the track and wait for ,8 train to pass. But I mean that's dangerous. `Certainly is,' says Joy, the secretary, en passant. 'You could die of starvation.' Or again, when stolid George is sweating over his story on the state of the econorliY, he complains: 'God, I wish I could under stand this.'
`But it's very simple,' says Helen. 1311 ont says he's in charge and the marked panic. Then Major says he's in charge an, the markets panic. Then they say they ar working as a team and the markets run to the toilet.' `Well yes,' says George, tut if only I could see the pattern.' There are plenty of us who don't see it either, which makes the feat of spotting the fact, and turning it within days into high' class TV comedy, all the more astonishing'
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