Grace Dent: Almost Everything I’ve Done, I’ve Been Told No First

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0:42Hello and welcome to Full Disclosure, a podcast project conceived entirely to let me spend more time with interesting people than I would ever get on the radio. Grace Dent, welcome. Hello. Shall we start with adjectives? You are a columnist, which means I have to use words like witty, incisive. When I was on The Express a million years ago, we had a columnist who was waspish witty and wise. Who was that? Peter Torrey. Came back a while. You know, I always wanted to be a columnist from when I was a little girl. You know Gene Rook? Yes, of course. Women like that. When I was a little girl, my mom and dad would buy the mirror, the sun, they flitted around.

1:23But there was invariably one page in that paper and it would be a woman with massive hair. And there'd be a small picture. And then underneath she would be pouring forth about life. And I used to think that is the best job in the world. Anne Robinson, for example. Yes, she did it for a while. I remember someone told me, God, I must have been at university that she had. And this may be wrong, Anne, but it sounds like you. That she'd brokered her own deal for a six-figure sum to just give her opinions. And I thought, I want that. I want it so much. And I did have it for a little bit at The Independent.

2:04I did a lot. And I think that you can do it for about a year and a half and you go absolutely mad. You turn into something that you weren't to start with. I know every respect to all the women that are doing it and that can keep it going. but I think that in this day and age to wake up at 7 well earlier to wake up at 5 in the morning see what's trending on X and then with 20 minutes try and form your opinion a pungent opinion like a hot take as I believe the kids call it and then put it up in this day and age you get stuck up online pretty much unsubbed none of the spelling mistakes taken out of which there are many when I write and uh and then you get that blowback so yeah I'm not a columnist anymore it's as if you're withdrawing yourself from consideration for a vacancy that I didn't know existed god I don't I be warned you're not interested I um yeah I absolutely you know I think I I enjoy I love writing and I I love you know everybody loves that reaching people through that medium when I'm writing about food I love writing about restaurants but yeah this is why i admire you james as we were sitting down i said to you james i said you did you care too much well don't say that i said you care i said you care too much are there not just days when you fancy coming in and going today's phone in is about a lovely burger i do that i did once back in the day do a phone-in on whether there was any food that couldn't be improved any cuisine that couldn't be improved by the addition of cheese but it was in a different age i think the the answer to that is quite clearly no there isn't because even even asian cuisine i mean chinese is a bit of a push but with indian cuisine you've got paneer well and the koreans do love a bit of fried cheese yeah so there aren't any really you could improve almost anything by the addition of cheese they used to let me do phone and see these are the big questions that need to be answered yes i know they are and if anyone can answer them it's probably you um we should that ambition was early i mean it might sound like a slightly sort of fanciful rose-tinted memory that but it really was incredibly early your your your desire to write but we'll begin even even earlier than that in um uh in cumbria in currook yeah in in a in a i mean what you've talked about it being deprived place but you only have one childhood yes and it's the only childhood you know so you don't know that it's different from other childhoods until you're a little bit older so what are the early formative memories um i'm always very careful if i've ever said that it was deprived i think i'm talking statistically i should yeah you absolutely are and you know why yeah and you're absolutely right i think that's that's one of the things that tickles me the most about class that when you're when i was you know five, six, seven years old in the 70s in northwest England in Carlisle, I had no idea what posh really was.

5:16You know, to me, posh people, the upper classes would have been in my mind, somebody whose dad had a management job at a factory nearby. I had absolutely no idea of the actual, yeah, the differences. I think, you know, I always say I got to London when I was about 21 and I went to work for Marie Claire. And it was really then that I realized that, you know, the kids that were coming in and working in that office, there's a lot of difference when you've got a trust fund. And you have been cushioned by that idea that all times that there will be houses falling through the system, you know, falling through, you know, what's the word I'm looking for?

5:59Inheritance. uh going back to the big thing but being able to do relatively low paid work for a while yes in order to get better paid work because you didn't have to worry about rent that was a great divider because we're very similar ages and presumably i think you got started a bit earlier than i did career-wise but that was the big divider between having to work in a shop and actually being able to just sit around doing work experience or waiting for shifts on a paper or something like Absolutely, 100%. So, look, I was actually born in Aldershot. My dad was in the army and he was in the Remy for 25 years.

6:37And as he was coming out of the army, just around that point, we went up north to Carlisle because that was where my mother was from. And there was also a camp there at that point, Hadrian's camp. So my very earliest memories was a council house that we got through my dad just coming out the forces and then moving into a pebble dashed terraced house in a street that looked like Coronation Street. How did they meet? Well, they're both gone now, so I can tell the story. And I can tell the truth. My mother looked like Diana Dawes. She was, you know, booby and blonde and glam and wore trouser suits.

7:26And my father was a squaddy, a soldier, and had been stationed up in Carlisle for a while. And this is a beautiful love story, but they were both married to other people. Oh. so uh they um yeah they i think it was like eyes across a crowded office and at some point them having to run away together and they had me very very quickly so yeah i mean i look they were quite a big deal in the 70s much bigger deal than it would be now yeah yeah that's you're the first person that's ever really said that to me absolutely a hundred percent i think that um my parents met and ran away in haste and then uh lamented their decision over the next 50 years because i well you know i think that uh they they got together there was a hell of a lot of a rumpus scandal uh a lot of fighting when i was a child a lot of fighting a lot of drama but couldn't live with each other but absolutely couldn't live without each other I don't think that that's a particularly healthy way to grow up but I am also very grateful that I had my mom and dad they're both doted on you I think yeah I mean in their own ways like I had a I had a very northern working class childhood so there was no you know I was never I was never I was never told I was beautiful i was never told i was special i was always told there was i always think that with my childhood there was more of an attempt to kind of put a cloche on it you know i remember kind of going but i'm going to be famous how early would you start thinking that i mean god james seven seven eight where did that come from from the fact that i lived in i lived in a terraced street and there was no one in my family that was in academia.

9:27There was nobody that had been involved with academia. I'd had a career and I was brought up by pop culture. And from the earliest part of my life, I looked at the television and I looked at Kenny Everett with Cleo Rokas and Top of the Pops and the Human League and ABC and... God, we are the same age. This is ridiculous. And I was brought up by pop culture and I remember looking at it and thinking, there is a world out there and I want to go there. Adam and all these people that were the biggest dandies and I wanted to be part of that. From an early age, I remember my mum bought me a little record player and she wanted me to play ABBA, the album that's got Super Trooper on it.

10:22the arrivals and my big brother brought home a copy of Parallel Lines by Blondie and I was only a little girl and I remember putting that on and knowing every word to that album and there was something about those songs and pop music that I was like and then buying smash hits oh yes you know 80 smash hits going down to the newsagent and it was bi-monthly and it arriving and reading every page of what David Hepworth and Mark Ellen were doing and Tom Hibbert and looking at the letters page and thinking there's this world out there. At the end of our street there was a, like, it sounds like something out of a movie, but the railway track to Carlisle, sorry, the railway track from Carlisle to London, the northwest line anyone that knows northwest avanti trains goes from one place to another that train went really near my house and i knew that london was 235 miles or something away uh it took seven hours by train back then in the 70s and i wanted to go my my big brother who's 10 years older than me he went first and he went to manor house yeah and uh so when i was eight he was 18 and he was squatting uh he was a punk and you know kind of like kind of a bit of a new age indie kind of hippie uh into animal rights and uh very political so as soon as i could i was coming down on that train and getting that taste for london and that was what inspired me i was there was i was never i you know i love carl a hell of a lot more than i was there the other day now i'm in my 50s i love that place but when you're 14 all you want to do is be in soho potentially snogging john taylor from duran duran maybe not you not john it was it andy simon no um but kiddin minster probably has quite a lot in common in curwick if you're built that way and you do because and those make but where did and the cloche presumably was mum and dad saying don't be daft that's not for the likes of us yeah uh i think my mother and she said this until the day that she died about my life she would look at it all and go you don't have make life hard for yourself don't you because my life would have been probably kind of lovely if I'd stayed in Carlisle.

13:03Her dream was that I would have made a good marriage with somebody from Carlisle. I could even tell you the guys that I should have married. I won't name them. Whose dads had building firms. And we could have had a nice house and done it up and had a breakfast bar. And that's what she wanted for you. Yeah. So she found you a mixture of exotic and confusing. Yeah. I think that the mistake we sometimes make as working class people when we kind of leave the nest and we start to experience these and, you know, what is relatively amazing, going to a private members club and them treating you like gold and wrapping the lemon that they give you with the drink in a piece of muslin and, you know, charging you 19 pounds for some calamari on a plate.

13:53all of these things i think as working class people we think what we need to do is bring our family and they'll love it uh and they don't no they don't and they they resent you for it because they they think i just you know they and i think i i did spend a good 25 years of my life going ma 'am like come with me and i'll take you to this hotel and they're just looking at the prices and going out this isn't for me i feel uncomfortable and we used to kind of argue quite a lot about it as I got uh to the near the end of their life and the penny dropped for me and I hope I don't upset people by saying this that I realized that you know a lot of a lot of working class people they don't want to do these ridiculous fancy things they just want more money to have fun doing the things that they like to do uh so despite becoming you know this restaurant critic and having access to everything my dad's favorite restaurant was Wetherspoons and to be able to go going somewhere like that and go, it's all on me, because let's face it, it's 35 quid, right, was a big deal.

15:01So, yeah, but like, I mean, God, this is a shorthand way of saying, this is a saying like, look, you know, me and my mother fought like cat and dog from when I was a child, when I was a teenager. We loved each other fiercely, and I nursed her right up until her last dying breath. but yeah proper northern northern working class of women we me with massive aspirations to leave and and do fantastic things and her saying look but do you not realize that like steve you know steve smith's uh single steve smith is single he's only got yes he has got facial tattoos that's all the rage no i don't even know why i'm mentioning it i'm mentioning that like a like a reference to it being something bad everyone's got them well you haven't yet the facial tattoos no not yet there's a danger of i mean i've obviously from a much more privileged background than you but but not two generations previously and i've got friends who much closer to what you've described than my upbringing was people feel that you're telling them that their choices are wrong don't they they feel that you're saying well you can't be happy because you're not doing the things that make me happy and the things that make me happy are bigger and brighter and more expensive and if only you had the money and the access then your life would be better too it's actually quite potentially quite insulting sub subconsciously and unintentionally i think that um and i think that from the other side the people that are still in the town that you were from they feel the same about you they don't look at you and think you're happy they they look at you and they probably feel kind of belligerent when they hear that you've maybe done an advert for something or got a television show and there's money coming in.

16:51But I don't think that they take a scan over your life and go, well, that looks amazing. That's the weird thing, isn't it? Because I think growing up, if you have that, and when you were talking earlier, it was almost as if domestic life was in black and white and London was in colour. If you want to sort of carry on with the cinematic theme, you think everybody wants what you want. You think, because you think, why wouldn't you want to be on top of the pops or at least writing about, surely everybody wants this life, but they don't. I agree. I think that you do think that, and then I think as the years go by, you certainly analyze what was it within you that made you want to run away as quickly and as brightly and as far.

17:38and some people were incredibly happy there was far far far cleverer people than me in my class I wasn't by any means the top of my class and they didn't run to London to become QCs or directors of business they stayed in in Cumbria and they are they've now got grandkids and they're very happy but it's not not just what was in within you that made you want to run away it's also where the idea came from that you not just might belong in this world but that you deserved to be in it i mean that's quite odd given your given what you've told us about your background why did i deserve yeah i definitely go back again to pop culture because i have a theory that although there are a lot of working class people that uh don't don't adapt and don't want to adapt they don't want to be at uh golden eye in jamaica spending 55 000 pounds on a holiday they don't want that they don't want to be commissioned in their own ridiculous suits from savile row and they don't want to buy buy a tank and use it as a car and appear on that stage i do think that sometimes with the working classes when you give them a little sniff of it we are the biggest dandies of all and we're the the biggest show-offs and uh we believe that there is a place for us but then look i don't think that i am i don't think i'm a role model or a massively great example for anybody i do think that i am in a lot of ways uh a terrible warning and if anything if anything, just winging it, just winging it.

19:29Back to school is busy enough. The last thing you need is shopping that makes it harder. Whether you're moving into a dorm, your first apartment, or just getting organized for the semester, Wayfair makes it easy to get everything you need in one place. Furniture, bedding, storage, decor, study essentials, all at prices you'll love with fast shipping before move-in day. Get everything you need for back-to-school season. Shop Wayfair.com today. Wayfair, every style, every home. What were you like at school then? Did you want to thrive? Did you want to flourish at school? I was thought of as incredibly clever and top of the class until I was about 10.

20:13and reading early and writing early and desperate to watch documentaries and happy sitting watching a child watching Alan Wicker and Michael Palin and Monty Python and feeling like I was really clever but then got to secondary school and I think it was a mixture of hormones and with no disrespect to a lot of people that might listen, the British northern 80s comprehensive school system, I don't think I fared very well in it. Did you disappear academically? I did well with languages and I did well with English and I still to this day go, how, how, and I'll say this again, how have I not got a maths GCSE?

21:05you probably shouldn't have said that there's so many jobs you're not allowed to do anymore well I mean and I haven't had any of them including presenting MasterChef I heard as long as they don't ever want me to count the plates we'll be fine but yeah I look you know but I was a goth by the time I was 14 did I disappear no I was in full monochrome there you know I went through a goth period and like I think that my face and the way I hold myself lends itself to being a goth I mean, I'm completely, I'm completely in white today. I'm the anti-Goth. But I was, yeah, dark, you know, black hair, white face, wanted to look like Susie Sue the whole time.

21:44Very into all Goth music and indie music. And I mean, I'm interested in what your mum and dad made of that. But I mean, that's, that's a furious. It's a fairly old. Kicked me out. Did they? Yeah. What about education? Did they see it as, as, because if your mum has got this idea that you should be happy with existing within the parameters of her existence then presumably there wasn't something which often happens in working class families where education is seen as the ticket out yeah so they didn't have that they didn't want you to be thriving at school so that you could get on the train out of carlisle um i don't think oh god yeah god this is very deep thank you for talking about this this is interesting yeah i think that they i think that they coated all of my especially when i went to do a levels i think that they potentially couldn't really see why i was going yeah and would not have cared if it had gone nowhere i think that they were worried for me i I think that they knew that.

22:53And this was not just my parents. I was in a group of girls, I remember, at that time. And some of them have thrived so amazingly. And I remember their parents arguing with them going, you know, Newcastle? Why do you want to go to uni in Newcastle? It's 60 miles away. And this is what, you know, it breaks my heart a little bit about now. That idea that university is too expensive and it's a road to nowhere. That's not new. None of that's new. We were hearing that in the 80s. Yeah, except that we lived through the extension of that possibility to parts of the society that it had never been extended to before.

23:32And you fancied some of it, just as a way of getting out, or did education hold other... I wanted to go to university because I knew that if I went and read English literature somewhere, then it would be handy as some sort of arts degree that I could then take to London for my glorious plan to become uh Polly Yates okay so on the telly rather than in print or Paula did all of it that's exactly what I mean I remember by the time I was 14 Paula was raging on the tube bringing her you know sparkle the glamour the dresses the the hanging out with the pop stars hanging out with the rock the you know the rock stars and then also writing a newspaper column with her big hair at the top of the page firing out the odd paperback fiction yes that i and that's what 14 if i'd met you said what do you want to be when you when you grow up you just said paulie yates paulie yates or janet street porter janet street porter basically she's going out with one of sieg sieg sputnik she's controlling youth tv on bbc2 she's hanging out with the pet shop boys she's putting on dance nation she's do you know she's running tv channels just to me just was like i want that i don't want to ask you this question 20 times you can do it ask me again but where do you think the confidence came from or the self-belief or whatever word you prefer that you could pull that off that you could at least have a crack at it thing is i haven't even heard you ask that question the first five times i think i've been talking and you're so clever this is why you're such a leading light in thought my parents sent me to a school like the one they sent me to in the hope that i would develop that i would be like the people my dad encountered in his career who never doubted their right to be in these positions my dad did doubt his right my dad grew up above a pub in leeds and and to a degree it worked yeah i had that kind of well why shouldn't you know you could say at my school that you were going to be prime minister when you grew up and no one would laugh at you or hit you yeah but where did you get the idea from that you could waltz into this world and and and belong can i be very honest please um one of my aunties who was um every bit as common as me every bit of every bit as common as me and i'm going to say this now because god bless you you're gone now um married a lord okay that's taken an unexpected turn she literally are we talking about like the 50s not bobby lord the local scaffolder one of my aunties again we i had a lot of very blonde radiant big boobs like capable looking farm looking women in my family you know good for the gene pool that just like really kind of, you know, women like, she was called Grace as well.

26:42And she played the accordion and she was like, you know, a force of nature. And she applied to be a secretary for a lord that had a small home in Cumbria, a small mansion in Cumbria. And she went there. And as my mother always said, well, the job changed its parameters. but like joking aside the scandal of that you know because I mean I came along in the 70s and she got a title and she used the title can you imagine she changed her accent as my mother would have said again I've got all these voices are coming back she used to go Grace doesn't she doesn't model herself on the Queen the queen models herself on hair but there was this idea with with my auntie that uh she had just jumped the fence yeah and uh and everyone in the family you know my my grandmother had uh six sisters and so there's you know there's a lot of a lot of women a lot of forthright women kicking about and uh yeah though it was it was huge scandal to suddenly have one of our family who had a completely different accent had access to money was doing all these crazy amazing things you know like buying buying buying a racehorse like doing all you know and we're all living in in in carlisle and uh and i think that that was that really really and you know she she divorced that husband and she found uh an equally high status husband now i'm different you know that i have never found a high status husband but to me i was fascinated by her fascinated by this idea that one day you can just suddenly go no no no this is who i am yeah i i go to london and i play bridge that's what she would do she was a cloche smasher yeah she smashed the cloche she'd go i'm going down to london and i played she used to play bridge with like you know important people and uh yeah i mean this was back in the days so if she if she could do that you could do what paulia did or janet street porter did or what if she could do that in that age i i could do yeah it's still extraordinary I mean, as you mentioned, when you arrive at Marie Claire and everyone around you is sort of gap year and trust fund.

29:25But you kind of smashed that cloth. You know something, when you talk about it, now we've kind of drilled down into it. I do need to kind of express that there are some days where it suddenly comes back and I go, how the hell did I do that?

29:46and I and I look at the sliding doors and I and I think and I suppose that you know sometimes that's why I whenever I hear somebody like distill about me when I hear criticism and I try to just take it on the chin but when you hear someone go oh she's just another toffee nosed blah blah and I and I feel like going oh there's a little girl in me that wants to go but have you seen my teeth Have you seen my silver fillings? Do you think? At least they're not black. I have got all of my teeth, just some of them are not in the right place. Well, part of the answer is that you really wanted it and you asked for it.

30:28You never stopped knocking because I used to be terrified of rejection. You didn't ever seem to have that. You were asking and applying for stuff from very early doors. well i applied and was rejected continually i mean come on we're about the same age and we're still up we still apply and are rejected continually who could i could i maybe be oh no i'm not getting that and those younger more beautiful people are i think that when i was younger when I first got to London I would apply for things and oh god I mean one of my pivotal jobs was the first restaurant the first restaurant column I ever had the Evening Standard and it was in ES magazine it doesn't exist anymore it was a pull-out Friday magazine and And it was a bit like how to spend it at the Financial Times.

31:29So this was one of my pivotal jobs. And I started it in 2011 or something like that. But what people forget or don't know is that there was a time in the 90s and the early noughties where I used to send article after article in on spec to them and just be ignored. And I just, my face, my face literally didn't fit. I hope I'm not sounding too pathetic, but it's the truth. It didn't fit. And so to suddenly appear and be that columnist, there was a hell of a lot of a buildup of, I mean, almost everything that I do in my life, I've been told no 10 or 15 times first. but you just have to keep just i mean my advice is to find the person that says yes you have to do that you have to ask a lot of people i think that your life is governed by finding uh four or five people in your professional life that understand you and really understand you those people who uh with me because i write it's finding those editors who i mean or producers who get you and let you thrive and trust you and let you just but you you have you have to believe that you've got something that other people haven't got you you have to read other people's work and have the confidence to think yeah i'm a bit better than that i've been their face might fit but my prose is better i always knew i was um i always knew i i was uh i was funny and i could crack people up and I had like a little bit of I always knew that I've I'm not the most beautiful girl and I'm not the cleverest girl and I'm not the richest girl um but when I go into a room there's I can I could sometimes raise the frequency a little bit and if I can do it and I also I always knew that say with the restaurant part of my life yeah I always knew that from the 90s that if if i walked into the office at mary claire and people said to me has anybody been to momo i should i get a table at momo and i'd go i'll tell you about momo and i knew that i could then talk for 20 minutes i go this is what it looks like this is who comes in blah blah blah don't sit in that thing and and kind of pour forth in a way that would make people will go okay i'm going to take notice of that they might not ever go they might not ever go they might not ever go to any restaurant around that place or spend any money there but they would remember uh and i feel like that was you know what i write about restaurants it's just like appointment viewing i don't think anyone's going to those restaurants when did that kick in because you're i mean food growing up unsurprisingly was not um exotic but only stretched the imagination i i know this language the language of the of the salt and shake crisps and you write beautifully about the, I mean, beige isn't really a fair word because it conveys not enjoying, whereas in fact it was really enjoyable having a Finder's French bread pizza or a crispy pancake.

34:52But I mean, this is the problem that we have with the ultra-processed food debate today, going back to the 70s when I was a child. the problem with this food is not that it's disgusting and that we're just eating it because we're just poor and we don't know anything better the fact is a Finder's crispy pancake in 1970 filled with minced beef was delicious oven chips with plenty of vinegar on dipped in salad cream are delicious you know, something as exotic in Carlisle as chicken fried rice out of a silver can Singapore noodles, all of these things brown pastries pies I didn't eat the rainbow when I was a child we didn't eat the rainbow I didn't eat we ate the sludge and I it's funny to kind of speak to my, you know, the food world is very middle class going into upper class and it is funny to talk about this because i don't ever want it it represented as you i then i starved and just ate these awful things it's more i want to tell the truth that in the 70s the basket that my mother took to the the tiny supermarket near my house this is the days before the big asdas and the big morrisons arrived on the outskirts of the scent of the city that was these were exciting times you know if you got some butterscotch angel delight in a sachet delicious tins of ambrosia rice pudding all of these things I had a cherry brandy lolly the other day do you remember them and it tasted like the summer of 76 when I'm too young to remember the summer of 76 but my mate is an ice cream man and he said you've got to have one of these and he's Italian so he normally brings me back like some olive oil from Italy or last time I saw him he had a big bowl of garlic that he'd grown in his garden so I was wondering what what exotic treat has he got and it was a cherry bread the other ones that taste almost of almonds yes absolutely delicious so when did the when did the and and part of the reason why it's dominated by middle and upper class people is is because of the financial exclusion from this this world that's the simple cost of things when did I think I think it's that.

37:26And I also think that for a long time, there was a very set way of looking at who was valid to talk about food. And when the chefs and the food experts often had a very set way of saying it, they went, I am an expert on food because I know, they would say, kind of read between the lines. I know all about French gastronomy because, and I know all about Italian food, because when I was a child, roughly speaking, they would all say, my family went on these fabulous, awesome long holidays. And from that, I learned to cook at the knee of the local woman that came in to cook. The nonna. The nonna. And, you know, that's kind of an amalgamation of 50 chef and food people's stories.

38:17And that is a lovely story. And we're still in love with that story to today that somebody will say, oh, the first time I tasted these this beautiful seafood was when my friend's father used to dive for them and bring them from the bottom of the ocean. And then when somebody like me would come along and go, look, I lived on toast and toast toppers until I was 17. But for me, this cornucopia of everything that I've learned ever since, I'm really, I really want to talk about it. But yeah, I think that when I came along into the world, it was not a shock, but to have the confidence to do it. I'm proud of myself.

39:03Well, where did it begin? Because we're going to gloss over, well, not gloss over, but I sense there's not a great deal to say about university in Scotland. It doesn't seem to be a massive part of the origin story. I was there for four years. You got a degree? I got my degree. I went to a campus university, Stirling University, in the middle of between Glasgow and Edinburgh. But you had the same ambitions when you left that you had when you arrived. Absolutely. You didn't discover your tribe or discover your calling or anything like that? No, I discovered that I needed to go to London as soon as possible.

39:39I'm surprised you didn't go to college there. I'm surprised you didn't apply to London University. I went to the only university that would have me. Okay. Because of the Massachusetts. Yeah, absolutely because of that. And because of Rave, I think, really, as well. I think that, if I'm being very honest. Big consideration in that era. I mean, look, I was 18 in 1991, 92. It's a very big part of it. I spent a lot of time in Manchester having fun. So we're probably in the same clubs at the same time, although I was climbing over the wall of my boarding school to get there a few years previously.

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40:57Burger or tuna, what a doozy. If only I could have one of every bite. Why can't we have food without the fight? With Wonder, you can combine 20 restaurants and one delivery, so you never have to choose. Download the app today. Wonder, food without the fight. So, I mean, the Cosmo stuff is important. This is what I mean about banging on doors and knocking your way in. You win a student panel contest at Cosmopolitan. So you're just gaining entry into this beautiful world. But the food. So because all of the potential role models that you've mentioned, none of them have a particular reputation in food journalism.

41:42And your background, as we've established, didn't lend itself to having friends whose fathers hand-dived their own scallops. for me until i moved to london the scallop was from the chip shop it was the big yeah potato slice i used to love a scholar i would argue like a scholar

42:06so when did when did your taste buds start tingling when did you start thinking oh by goodness this is my thing well i'd been uh i i arrived in london and i worked for women's magazines and uh through that as you'll well know because you've worked in journalism there's a lot more uh free things invites to launches invites and launches for launches for a perfume but it's going to be a fancy hotel uh invitations to go away for a weekend to this hotel courtesy of a pr company or whatever yeah so my life did begin to get bigger and uh more generous with the you know the kind of food i was being offered i've got to say though my uh i knew that i could do it and i knew that i could write about uh the you know china town and korea town and these places these fancy fancy restaurants i knew i could do this but my uh the person that really made me want to do it was michael winner oh really he had his sunday times column yeah sunday times and it was he the first winner's dinners it would be a third of it would be about something that had nothing to do with the meal before he got stuck into what the meal was actually i mean look looking back yeah looking back it was nothing that i ever recreated really i mean maybe maybe i have maybe on a particularly difficult day 75 of my column might be about me talking about who's in the restaurant but look back then i i think that i respected him because uh he was appointment he was reading yeah he was and that's what i've always wanted to achieve like i didn't go to any of the restaurants michael winner but you wanted to read i saw it yes no i've always wanted to write that column and i mean this with what i do with sincerely with what i do now every saturday you may never be going to go to that or where michael went but you go look kind of think pick up the paper and go turn to it first what's grace been up to yeah and it was like that with michael's i mean look michael caused massive umbrage right across london it was a very interesting man yes when he was booked to appear on lbc you couldn't keep him on hold you couldn't you had to ring him and he'd pick up the phone and you had to put him straight on air.

44:33Everyone else, even, you know, prime ministers know that they might have to wait for the adverts to finish or the news book. But he would just hang straight back up again if he wasn't put down. But I can remember elements of that column. Is it the only bit, this may have changed now, but is it the only bit of critical journalism, being a critic where you can fly blind, where you can go off on glorious tangents? So, you know, if you're reading a theatre review, you don't really want to be reading about the theatre critics weekend or the journey to the theatre. That is a really good question. I think that music journalism back in its day used to have like rock stars, you know, kind of rock stars in their own right as journalists who would talk about the way there and how it went and the friendship and everything.

45:28but yeah I do think that perhaps I do have a unique job and that I can start by analyzing the name of the restaurant go into a little bit about the genesis story and then talk about the history of Italian food and yeah so I get that that's that's what attracted you to it as a journalist as a writer and it it ticked all your boxes in a way that you couldn't really have predicted or known before it before it happened but what about the actual passion for food when where did that come from presuming there is one that absolutely is i know there is there absolutely is a passion for food i think that i started to eat out in fancy london restaurants and something happened to you yeah i think that i I think do you know was it the fact that it wasn't the fact that the food was fabulous although it obviously you know when you're sitting in the connor when you're from Carlisle and you're suddenly sitting in the connor or Claridge's or one of those you know top 50 restaurants yes the food is fabulous but I think back then in the in the 90s especially I was much more clouded by when the food wasn't good yeah and i was angry on behalf of the people who had been were being sold this idea by the machine and i think i started going why are people coming in here and paying 24 pounds for this ropey old tagine i know that there's an amazing one being sold in wood green why are we doing this in piccadilly and i think with that i really wanted to have my voice hurt uh but god look yeah my passion for food i have like i mean the food is food is the biggest love of my life and food is my greatest enemy you know i just feel like i spend i was just about to walk in here and uh i was like eating a tiny yogurt because i'm always clawing back calories trying to trying to go oh i mean nobody wants to hear this but i'm always like okay so if i just to eat very lightly you know then i can have six courses at six o 'clock when i go somewhere yeah so food is it's the greatest love of my life but you know desperately always trying to rein it in and and communicating that love is what what has made you who you are today really i mean on on paper and on screen and there's no there's no i don't think there's any greater pleasure in life than a loaf of really really amazing fresh bread and a pat of salted good quality french butter and a pot of jam that somebody's just somebody just going have you tried my fig jam from my award-winning figs and to me those simple things there's nothing better than that clubbing isn't better than that being in love isn't better than that being rich isn't better than that that moment there is nothing better than that is there anything better than there's a different there's just two types of people i think is jamie oliver always tells the story of feeding some friends of his from school who were from the traveling community and he just wanted them to taste a bit of smoked salmon from his dad's pub with lemon squeezed yeah that was it just brown bread and butter and and he when he tells the story you can see the 10 year old he was at the time he just wanted his mates to get that taste and to get that flavor and and i guess that he'd be where you are he'd be saying there's nothing better than that those moments of absolute mouth magic my um my my brother i'm very very close to he won't eat smoked salmon no he won't they they don't want like he would say raw fish yeah i don't or or or a you know a beef tartare where it's literally the raw the raw beef now these things are delicious but i think that you know i'm from a place where everything would be thought of as more delicious if it's that five minutes on each side so i mean i don't want to gloss over the the journalism you did before you became a food journalist that the world of lather in the guardian was for me an appointment to read even when i wasn't watching the program oh you are so sweet i didn't think you remembered that well i think a lot of people will do and you did you did an awful lot of different things we haven't talked about your young adult fiction either it's a girl thing and the various letters les bambinos dangerosos do you know something i came into uh we're filming this in the global studios and um i came in here last year and there was this gorgeous beautiful fully grown woman on reception and she checked me in and she said are you grace dent i used to read your books when i was a little girl and i just was like oh my god so that's how that's how long ago it was but i did i look yes i was very happy but it was very sobering moment james because yeah look i i wrote a lot of teen fiction but bloody hell i mean that was it did really queen of teen no less short queen of teen but what i'm pushing you towards is the difference between writing and talking about food and doing all the other media jobs that you've done there's a distinction between the two i think that uh all the other media jobs that i ever did were people recognizing that I could do something and offering me jobs and me never being in a position as somebody from my background that was just going to slot into this position of greatness.

51:29You know, I think that when somebody offered me something, do you want to, do you want to, do you want a column at The Guardian? Yeah. Oh, it's about soap operas. All right. Okay, I'll do it. I know I can do it. I can flex my word skill. So this is journeyman type. I can turn my hand to anything because I've got the tools to do. I can just do it. I can give you good copy, whatever the subject is. I think that anybody who is still here in media. Still here. At our age, and I mean it, still here. I think anyone that's still here. Don't jinx anything. Darling, I think that if you look at any of our CVs, It is pivot, pivot.

52:13It's just pivoting from one thing to the next. You have to move. I would love to be able to sit here and go, well, when I was reading Michael Winner's column, I went to people and said, I'd love to be a restaurant critic. And they said, Grace, well, when a position comes up, you're going to get it. You know, just you wait here. God, that was never going to happen. And when I looked around back in the 90s and the noughties, when you looked around, who was the restaurant critics, there was certainly nobody that was like me. I didn't think that I had a chance in hell. It was a sheer fluke that I got that first column.

52:58And when they offered me it to just fill in, I didn't get offered the job. None of us ever get offered the job, do we? No, no, no. You know, when you get your... Not immediately. No. You might do enough for them then to say, oh, well, I suppose we should formalize this. But I'm sure the same as me, when you get offered to fill in for something that you really want, you think they will take that out of my cold, dead hands, right? Yeah, tell me about that. And, yeah, and I think I was like that with a restaurant column.