Jamie Oliver: “I’d gone from being skint to having a lot of money, I felt like a fake.”

0:02This is a Global Player original podcast.

0:11Hello and welcome to Full Disclosure, a podcast project designed to let me spend more time with interesting people than I would ever get on the radio. Jamie Oliver, welcome. Will you let yourself down now? Oh, shut up already. We've done this before in various different formats and various different lengths. I think the very first time I interviewed you, you were slightly unnerved by how much I knew about you. Because I'd been a lifelong fan and a proper admirer. And also I sensed, and I don't think you're like this anymore, is that you wouldn't immediately trust somebody if they told you that they loved you.

0:43Somebody in my profession. Yeah, well, I guess when you grow up working in the media, you hear lots of things and you get naturally a little bit like, really? Or a little bit defensive. But I think as I've 25 years now, and I think part of one of my relationships with the media and journalists is kind of like that they can like you, they can dislike you. But hopefully if you played the right cards, I've tried to like I've never lied to them. So you're and I'm quite consistent at the things that I do. So I find that it makes life a bit easier. And secretly, I love it when people say they love what I do and they can reference meals.

1:20I mean, one of the best bits of my job is when someone said, oh, I've done that dish and we had it at this part of our life or I followed this program and it was it. So, of course, that's an enjoyable thing for me. I did the couscous from the first book on Saturday night. Really? Yeah, the very first one where you peel the red peppers and you stick them under the grill. It was one of the first times ever that I felt like a chef as opposed to just copying stuff mum had taught. Yeah, I mean, getting asked to burn stuff and peel it is genius. Yeah. Amplify those flavours. But, I mean, what's interesting is that book has aged well.

1:50it really has i've got the new edition 26 years old and it's incredible yeah and it's sort of you know but that's content isn't it like you just if it's good hopefully it stands the test of time and that is true now even in a world where i mean we probably wouldn't have known what the word content or it didn't use the word content when you started out but something else that struck me when i was just swatting up on on stuff that i largely already knew was if we're going to talk about being ahead of your time or being ahead of time your parents were way ahead of their time when it came to the simple question of freshness at the pub where you grew up.

2:22Yeah, definitely. I mean, I thought it was normal, but of course it wasn't. Yeah, at the pub, which they just sold it like two years ago after 47 years of business. You weren't tempted. Do you know what? I just lost my restaurants. Yeah. And I couldn't afford it. Fair enough. And it's one of my big, huge life regrets. What, you'd like to hang on to it? Well, Dad started it from nothing. Yes. And we sort of came from a very... uh i was born into a very uh rough and violent council estate um sort of towards gray's essex and estuary estuary land and then when my sister was born dad took the punt i think in like 70 hours to go out to essex into this dirty old pub and then he sort of did it up with love but just put real food in there real food not just typical like pub food but it was kind of anglo french food and he was a chef by trade and grew up in a pub and that was the village I grew up in and that is what I thought was normal but of course game from the village you know local produce he went to fish market sort of twice a week went to the veg market once a week yeah there was sort of classic pub fare in the pub side of the pub and then on the other side was a restaurant and it It would be, you know, like quite posh.

3:40And actually that's all of that food that I grew up cooking really from 10 to 20 is the kind of food that is the inspiration for Catherine Street, my restaurant, which, you know, was my comeback about a year and a half ago. But yeah, Mum and Dad. Yeah, Jamie Oliver, Catherine Street is in Catherine Street, Covent Garden, next to Theatre Royal. It's a lovely space, isn't it? Yeah, it's beautiful. And it was an emotional one for me because obviously I had seven, eight years of of amazing time with james italian and then three years of slow death and it was just the worst set of feelings and emotions in my life on every measurable and and it was just around the hum of the pain of all that loss which is mental physical frankly and financial of course um um then when mum and dad went to sell i couldn't buy it but i also think that because my dad because my dad's such a workaholic i think if i'd have bought it he'd have never stopped so he has actually retired right so he's hung up his hat we all bet he couldn't retire because he's been a workaholic all his life um but actually he can relax and he grew a beard and i've never i've never seen him in a beard like never because he's shaved twice a day because he was always with a suit on in service and then sort of like um scruffs when he was doing prep but yeah in a way i think it panned out right because i think he would have carried on working so good on them so there's two things there there's the freshness which again was uh not unique but rare and certainly rarer in the corner of essex where the cricketers was um opened its doors and also the work ethic that you've just described like again something you would have considered to be completely normal because you're one of those people who sometimes seem to have found 28 hours in the average aren't you but your dad i mean like everybody in the hospitality trade the workload is extraordinary yeah i think like dad um like because i struggled at school um um um before that could make me sad it didn't make me sad i knew i wasn't very i i knew i couldn't fit into school i went to special needs and and i've talked about this around dyslexia and and going to special needs classes and all that sort of stuff like when i could have been molded into a kid that was sort of like very sad and a bit depressed and sort of go down a very common pattern that leads to the statistics of dyslexics being about 60 % of prisons and all sorts of things and you know paid less than average wage and getting involved in all sorts of issues and challenges I was working at the weekend probably for illegal child labour if I'm honest I mean it was send you up well I don't think you're allowed to employ 10 year olds let's put it that way and he did and it was£1.20 an hour and but I think when things weren't great at school they were always great at work and I always felt part of a team and i always knew i was given a job and i finished it and then if i struggled i'd have another go and i'd get better at it it's not rocket science and of course as you collect that patchwork quilt of jobs you start understanding a part and then a complete part of a trade and of course by the time i was 18 i'd kind of been around the kitchen about four times um so i had this amazing head start so i was really lucky and it's a dichotomy though this is almost two used did you turn off a bit at school once you just started you just sort of yeah we're on autopilot yeah i just thought well i'm thick so i'm just not going to try um so it's extraordinary how many people sit in that chair when we dig into their childhoods people who've achieved a heck of a lot in their lives who have that at the very beginning yeah brian connolly was sitting there not long ago and he he literally was told it all the time you're thick you're thick and he he did a bit of therapy after his dad died and he reckons he spent his whole life shouting to the audience you see i'm not stupid yeah yeah yeah i'm worth something i've got something to offer and i think that that was very i did a documentary on dyslexia this year which by default was a metaphor for neurodiversity um and it was interesting because um obviously i am dyslexic so i thought i knew a lot about it and i really didn't and so i really got into the woods as we would if you've got the job of being a journalist and finding out the truth and spoke to neuroscientists and and and how does the brain work and and then looking into education and kids but i think you know rewinding from the 60 65 percent of dyslexics in prison you know and rewinding through like higher proportions of mental health and suicide and being paid less than average wage and and higher proportions of people in council estates and all the kind of like and more trouble with the police and huge, you know, higher rates of being expelled and all the trouble that goes with it.

8:11You wind back to a six, seven, eight-year-old child, which are all beautiful. Yeah. And really emotionally, like to this day, 10 to 15 % of every class is dyslexic, not including other neurodivergent students. Sure. And what we're doing, we're trying to do a good job, but what we're doing is we're not filling those six, seven, eight-year-olds. I think that's where the damage is done. I think that's where Brian's memories come from. I think that's where mine come from. You think children need things to accomplish and school should be there to, you know, give positive reinforcement because of giving various versions of tests.

8:54The problem with dyslexic and neurodiverse kids is they don't quite fit into the tests that are typical in school currently. So they slip through the cracks. They slip through the cracks and it's not a fully inclusive class. When did you give yourself a break, though? Because I like this dichotomy. I don't like it. I feel obviously it has elements of heartbreak to it. But you've got this dichotomy where you're convinced that you're stupid, that you're thick. But you must have known in some ways that you weren't. not just with the cooking, for which you clearly demonstrated great talent quite early, but with the communicating.

9:29You must have known that you were a communicator. That was normally something we associate with intelligence. Yeah, I mean, I think because when I was young, I thought that intelligence was a kind of club and it was a certain shape. And, of course, there's all kinds of intelligence. And when I learned from the scientists about dyslexia, which again it it it's not just about dyslexia because when you study the brain you you know you get reassured that nature requires and wants and commands diversity and actually these brain patterns and these things that we call names and these things that we create problems for are actually they've always been they always have been all of us wouldn't be here unless nature had provided like different thinkers and different problem solvers and actually the only thing that's weird is the construction of the structure of school as we know it which isn't genetic it's not from god it's not you know it's not mother nature it's a human a brilliant human construction that serves quite a few but not all um and i guess probably and and what because what you see is a kind of dichotomy of the the prison story is like 30 to 40 percent of entrepreneurs are also dyslexic and neurodivert so i think um but i think more than that um when when they make classes inclusive what's genius about it is actually not helping the ones that you expect the other 70 of the class of what we would call neurotypical um uh thrive even more and they become more empathetic to the colors of people and brains and and team the concept of a team player oh he or she will do that because they're really good at that oh yeah and i guess the the challenge of life isn't it is like what do you love what you're good at okay well maybe stick to it and then master something in that area and kind of go with your flow where in those in the i mean in the 25 years you referenced at the outset at what point would you have allowed yourself to think that you were not thick um oh good one um well i think when people uh would say oh my god that i think when we started 15 the restaurant where we trained kids that were very much like me from a school point of view not from a life and family point of view sure um what we proved at 15 was um uh we could be really expert in trans radically transforming and rehabilitating kids considered to be problems by the state and our statistics were exactly opposite 80 percent plus graduate and staying in the industry and becoming taxpayers and running families and and and and being able to surf life um without the going down the path of more crime um so it i because we had very human approaches to um the environment that those kids were rehabilitated around safety around mentorship um but also around like even picking the kids in the class was more important than when i when i paid a professional to come in after three years and do what i did they got all the same kids from the same background with the same problems and it went really wrong uh what we did from the beginning was yes we largely were serving kids from crime or homeless and stuff like that but there was like a third of the kids that were sort of like just like regular kids that were lost sure and it was that variation of their own that their kind of student colleagues of age ethnicity background rich poor that allowed them to self-police themselves in a way that then the structure that i put around them could just fill them up because if when we got all the kids from the same background when they all got angry they were all angry yeah and no one could control them right you know so it was kind of like when emotionally they're ebbing and flowing like that if they're all doing it it's carnage and if you apply that thinking to all kinds of institutions you really need that because you need the mates not the teacher to sort of say calm calm calm down have you ever thought about because it's because it's always about perspective and actually that leans back to what we just talked about which is an inclusive class is a metaphor for example well it's exactly what i just described which is when you have a class where you recognize that some people are just brilliantly geniusly sporty or physical or problem-solving or mathematical or amazing with nature or can physically do things with their hands and or have the brain that is sort of geeky enough to focus on something like origami for like three months and just knock out a concord out of a bit of paper so i think you know that's i kind of like you know call it the kind of united colors of benetton or whatever but I think that's um but they're all at the same level you see yes and we always are upset I mean it's important of course but we always think it's about the walls and the control and and the teachers and so I think there's good work to be I think that's that's when I kind of got told that maybe I wasn't thick but um but it was innate you're describing a natural ability that you had like a get because you can bring in professionals to do it with their whatever they had their PhDs and their CVs, but they couldn't somehow feel what you felt in those environments.

14:47And there was something around the kind of the predictable view of dyslexia being tricky, which meant that words couldn't do everything. So when you look at one of my recipes, it's like, yeah, I tell you to do something in a certain way for a certain amount of time at a certain temperature. But that's not really enough, because like the other side of dyslexia is be descriptive. So or until it looks like this and blips at the side and does that or tastes like this and feels like that. So I think feeling is really important, not just telling. And, yeah, I think you can be a bit more – I try and be a bit more 3D about descriptions.

15:22And the only winner is if you can – because that's the thing. When The Naked Chef started, if you look at that book one that you quoted, like even for a book one and someone that had never published a book in their life, in actual fact, failed English and can't spell. And actually, I've never, ever written a book, ever. The first three books I did on Dictaphone. Dictate them, right? And then I dictated to a person when I could afford it. So actually, the truth is I cannot rely on myself to write or type. Sure. So you're doing something else. So what? I can still be authentic. But I think ultimately, using pictures, step-by-steps, illustrations, words, conventional or unconventional sentences.

16:06Like sometimes I get told off because you can't do that because it's not grammar. I don't care it's my book I'll do that thanks do you know what I mean but if it's all for the cause of making something simpler or make because I always look at recipes like sat nav you know you want to get to A to Z with the least friction so somehow I found my thing in a cookbook I love that I know that you failed English this is one of those moments where I freak you out with my knowledge of your part of your life art and geology you passed yeah and I've often thought about that I'm not a geologist and I'm not a good artist but I got an A in art and a C in geology I think yeah but actually they were the only two things at school where physicality came into it some of the stuff you've just been talking about yeah geology, field trips and all that sort of business

16:57one riddle is solved pretty easily because I think you encountered cruelty at school as well low level cruelty yeah i think it was it wasn't bullying um i think many do get bullied yes yeah and well i know it because i've studied it and it's it's very i wasn't but i think um and i so i don't feel i got cruelty but i i feel that i wasn't put into a position where i was um uh what's the word like what is the word like i think your job is to sort of like puff up everyone and kind of make them feel that they've got something to offer and i think i think that kind of feeling of being the last one to be picked like i guess metaphorically like of course in the sports game out of the last one every time i think like from an education point of view i just thought ah well it's not for me and i and i don't think it was very self-esteem is what i'm but you were getting that at home and you were getting that in the kitchen and and i presume that pretty quickly somewhere between 10 and 20 you are thinking i'm going to do this for the rest of my life are you yeah i mean i i i luckily had kind of like grown up cooking a lot summer holidays um uh i never had to ask for pocket money because i always earned money you must have been quite a quite a wealthy teenager well i was it was brilliant because did you buy your own drum kit uh my second one yeah yeah i got the first one for christmas from freeman's catalogue oh it was a thunder uh thunder four piece but um but i um but no i saved up and and actually that was because i was in a band for like most of my childhood and like you know i want a snare drum it's 150 quid right okay that's like a month's working if i do this that and the other but i think that the idea of being independent was a really empowering thing the idea of not having to ask anyone for money was very empowering but also the idea of like because i grew up doing weddings and stuff with my dad yeah you have to set up something from nothing in the middle of a field yeah so the idea of like hiring tables putting them out ordering food doing stuff to it is called cooking creating a meal having service having people having teams rattling out on time safely deliciously like kind of running the day you know dad used to congregate the days have the moments and sort of have the silence and the best man come and like so in a way we would call that kind of production sure so i kind of grew up that as my norm so i kind of when i was 17 i thought i could do anything yeah do you know i mean like oh jay i want you down the market next wednesday uh you're gonna do um fish and chips or fajitas or burger whatever and you're going to do it and i'm fine cool all right what's the you know so i knew i guess the concept of dreaming and creating and doing didn't seem so scary to me but you also knew you needed the formal training as well you needed to go to college which you did around that age yeah and that was brilliant because having left school with nothing um because i could cook already i didn't have to worry about learning to cook i I mean, of course, I did learn to cook and more, but the basics were already there, so I could concentrate on the theory.

19:58And the theory was fairly robust. It was science, health and safety, biology. You're learning French. So for me, that was going back to that nightmare. Because at school. Yeah, and I had resented it. But because I was in a world, because there was context. A purpose. You could see the point of it. Yeah, yeah. so I passed everything with merits and bits and pieces so that was that was very rewarding what um I don't want to say what's the difference between a good cook and a good bad cook or a good chef and a bad chef but I mean just because you grew up where you grew up and because your dad did what your dad did it didn't actually it's not like night following day that you'd be gifted in that field yourself when did people spot the fact that you probably did have something a bit special um i don't know really i mean i did i guess everywhere i worked i i um progressed very quickly um and although i was sort of like were you proud of that did you notice that at the time yeah yeah i did notice it yeah and and i and i think it was some core values that my dad taught i mean always even the when i left to london at 18 um he's sort of like you know son always always treat other people's business like our business like don't just do your job do every job like if the phone rings pick it up if you don't know the answer just take their details and get like if you see something on the floor you pick it up don't wait for anyone so all like the concept of multitasking and and but also like what people often don't talk about running business if you're a business owner or runner like it's business i would i would be as in you know in general is very hard yeah it's like everything's against you so when you start employing people that will take a bullet for you and are happy to do a few extra hours and actually just show their loyalty then the quid pro quo is like you get to progress quicker maybe before your time i mean i was literally a fetus and i was going and i was very young and i was essentially doing a sous chef's job at the river cafe um and uh you know but they they want you they have to trust you really trust you um to protect the business and and yeah i think um i've never heard that put so well because i sometimes worry in my industry that you you try to communicate to somebody that you you need to go the extra mile but you don't want to sound like you're making them fetch your dry cleaning or or or being a tyrant or something like that but it your dad gave you that gift of it coming from within so it became almost second nature to you to to just do a little yeah yeah i I would say to people, whatever your job is, that's the least of what...

22:38If you want to express your true genius, if you've got a product and it's brilliant and best of category, so what? Because it's all the other stuff. How something makes you feel, how you communicate it. And I think if you're working... If you're an employer and you've got a team that actually feel for you, because it sounds like a violin. every business owner in this country is struggling right now now more than ever like um so and they're paying out bills left right and center but actually and then and there's loads of sort of like you see things on social going like just do the minimum take your money and like it's like there's the kind of a badge and doing the least because that's how you the currency flows in a certain way and yeah but that's if you look at currency like if you want to if you if to get the trust of someone that's running a business will allow you to try test evolve and progress in immeasurable ways and there's a bit of luck involved in doing something that you love as well for sure if you're for sure it's a lot more tempting to just go through the motions if you're doing if you're i mean i i would tell anyone to try and work in something that they love um you jumped to the river cafe we should just back up a little bit you spent time in france um and then i think that the first sort of seminal relationship for you professionally was when you arrived at um carluccio antonio carluccio's restaurant on neil street where you i think first um encountered gennaro who i you were with him last time i saw you at nico ladinis's funeral and there is such extraordinary chemistry between the two of you yeah i mean who would have thought that my best friend was going to be an old age pensioner oh he'll love that yeah do you know what there's there's a funny um i'll tell you a funny story so i was at paul smith and it was it was um genaro's 70th birthday and i said look dude come with me i'm gonna buy a suit we're gonna fit you a suit we're gonna get you a suit i'll make you look great oh lovely lovely oh you're so kind so we're down there in in paul smith putting on the suit and um nick clegg walks in with his son hello jamie how are you and i'd just done some stuff for school dinners through him and with others and he goes this is my son he's 18 i'm getting him his first suit i went oh this is genaro he's 70 and i'm getting him his last suit you old bastard but no genaro is amazing um i mean he was amazing like he i think he kind of like was i mean antonio was amazing um almost like pavarotti of of pasta and foraging and him and Gennaro was like an incredible couple but I think Gennaro like really gave me the kind of the kind of mycelium you know the kind of roots the kind of depth of culture and therefore deliciousness and the kind of flexible appropriation of like that these things that we cook should be mutating and changing on a daily, weekly, monthly basis.

25:40And it shouldn't, you know, I've been hard trained in very strict French regimental cooking, which was very brilliantly militant and specific. And they are genius because of that. But obviously a little bit like learning music and playing things at a classic level, you know, you can still, you know, with the Italians, it was like learning to go and have a jam with a band and just like inventing grunge or punk. Do you know what I mean? and it wasn't just about cutting it was about punching and whacking and thwapping and tearing and that really resonated with me cooking from the heart instead of a piece of paper because a lot of cooking in some respects is like follow this, follow that spec sheet so yeah Gennaro was a lot of fun and also like a seminal moment of heart.

26:28So you keep pushing you're like a shark, you never stop moving how come you didn't just stay there, you didn't stay under Gennaro's wing for the next 10 years? Because I read the River Cafe book one yeah and it just immediately changed my life go on well i just i flicked through four pages and i just thought i just i need i need it i want it i want to be there like no one had designed a book like book one like um it you know obviously rose gray and ruth rogers two untrained chefs but genius cooks and rose rose was very artistic and as was her husband and ruthie rogers was married to Richard Rogers, Sir Richard Rogers, the architect, you know, Pompidou Centre, Lloyd's Building, like, you know, like, and this sense of style in the book was so apparent, and they were doing things in publishing, and as a dyslexic, you know, so yes, I might hate words, but also I love design, and I love fonts, and I love colour, because if part of dyslexia is order, then part of design is order.

27:31Of course. So I started having a very visceral... Bringing order to chaos. Yes, exactly. Wow. Yeah. So when you can't create... If you're a person... And that's what I learned even recently about, you know, because some dyslexics are brilliant readers and some are even brilliant spellers. Really? Isn't it all just jiggling around like me? No, no, no, no, no. There's a few flavors here. Some of it's like good, good, and then order, terrible. Right. So I think like for me, like seeing that design, seeing those colors, you know, what is that color? it's a Pantone colour that's not like you know in later life and even in book one like I learnt every single I didn't just publish an author I learnt honestly you can ask my publisher Tom Weld and ask him I learnt every he promised I went with him because he promised me if you go with me I'll teach you every part of publishing and I went to the factory I designed everything I know that most colours come from of course the three Pantone colours but then you get sort of extra colours that allow you to do certain things and shine and that the River Cafe was full of these extra colours and I'm like god it's not an accident is it it's not an accident it's all of the things you've just described and then when I went and walked into the River Cafe it was like it was like this sort of church still is I mean just church there was no compromise they don't just want good pork they want the best pork so I remember you you had the hump once about what one of the sort of higher end chains had i don't even know if you'll remember this they'd copied something something to do with the parquet flooring or something like oh yeah yeah yeah and you i didn't even know that you had your finger but now you've just described the first book was like that so yeah when you were putting together jamie's italian you were in charge oh my god every nail honestly like so like i have a penchant for wood wood and pasta you know bread it's all the same for me it's a living growing organism if i wasn't a chef i'd be a carpenter but i love floorboards i love old floorboards i love aging floorboards now i'm so weird but when i when i did james italian like it was like certain wood certain place laid in a certain way and then i'd notch and then it would go up the wall and it would notch in in a certain way without screws and stuff like that so i'd spec that you'd work with a lovely design company and they're all lovely and gorgeous and professional but they'd have a clause in their contract not to use intimate ip from this thing on other competitors or other people yeah and so they should too and i went tost albans and i walked into my restaurant and it wasn't my restaurant but it looked like my restaurant and it was right next door and it was another chain um and it was the same designer that hadn't done or honored what they'd said and uh basically like all the sourcing that we'd done we'd sourced beautiful things in such a way that we could afford it in even though we had good budgets but um yeah like it's uh i got ripped off but i mean i guess what do they say copying is the um serious form of flattery didn't feel like that that day did it not by not by a long chalk what i love about the way you tell these stories is that it doesn't sound like you were sort of shaking the dust from your shoes when you walked out of carluccio's you're still best friends with Gennaro you're moving to different and and in some ways better but never in a sense that denuded or diluted what you'd been doing before because you're constantly assembling whatever you're going to end up being as a consequence of all of these encounters and all of these experiences but the river cafe was well it was huge for two reasons firstly no one had ever done what they were doing before on all of the different levels that you describe and secondly that's where the tv cameras turned up yeah i mean i'd say like my childhood and my training gave me structure yeah genaro gave me soul and then rose and ruthie taught me the feminine which was a really important change point yes and the feminine isn't about chauvinism or masculine the feminine it was about two women that were untrained that just did what they want for the best uncompromising they were their their kind of barometer on ingredients was like to the hour like most menus are monthly or quarterly right like to the hour twice a day i nearly and i'm not easily i nearly went into tears in the first three weeks because i couldn't get my head around a menu that changed twice a day every day like and and and and they was no compromise for that stuff would come in just before service and they'd scrub something else that could wait out and put something that just walked in in like it was kind of chaos but beautiful chaos um and then yeah that's when i came in on a day that i shouldn't have been there and there was a documentary crew there and that was i guess my break my moment um you must have told this story a million times but i mean the elements of it that i like the fact that you weren't supposed to be there and the fact that you probably had no idea there must have been people behind the camera who were sort of high fiving each other at this kid who just had whatever it is that that i don't think they knew do you know no i was just one of many like there was like the river cafes has and always is full of like interesting cooks male female waiters they've all got a story to tell they're very arty um um i mean maybe better for the jeopardy was that i was actually on a promise from my beautiful wife so i really wasn't supposed to go in that day and i had my dad's voice go treat their business like our business and she's going you promised me tonight uh wink um but i anyway i chose my path um but um no i mean actually um there was nothing sexy about the crew the crew were in the way uh we were really busy um uh if anything they were quite annoying um there's like a microphone and a guy holding a little box with the sound and like it's a skinny little alleyway i was on hot too which is a section that had the pasta risottos uh the frito misto and the slow cooks so it's a busy section and they're right in my way um so so you haven't got time to be nervous no no so actually if you look back at the rushes like um i'm actually moving the lens out the way to get past it because there's something hot in my hand right so um but yeah i mean obviously they'd ask me a question from from their point of view they're great like what have you got there and the truth was in real time i've got a hot pan i've got some olive oil going in it i've got some butter i'm just going to put in a little bit of time first it's going to pop and then in some garlic then in some drolls we're not going to cook it that much we're going to take a little bit of that starchy cooking water from the pasta here and then we've got this tagletali it's just been freshly made so it only needs about a minute's cooking it's going to go in with it a little tiny bit of parmesan off the heat a squeeze of lemon juice and now it's going on the plate plate and off to theo theo's going to serve it and like of course an editor doesn't even have to edit that it's all there yeah so um i i ended up being in more than it more of it than i thought oh actually I didn't know I'd be in it because they'd been filming there for two weeks in different areas.

34:19So I had no illusion or hint that I was in the actual show. So you're not sitting there thinking, this is going to change my life. No, no, no, no. And then the night it went out on TV, I was working, so I never saw it. And then the next day, like some of the management had seen it. And one of them is a very prolific comedy writer now. Giles Bowden was the manager of the River Cafe and he phoned up internally and was taking the mickey out of me and pretended to be the BBC and I fell for it about 11 o 'clock oh that's brutal and then he starts giggling because I did fall for it so obviously I lean around the corner and we start doing the typical chef-y front of house abuse at each other but then in the middle of service the real people phoned up and I thought they were Giles so I said terrible things to these producers terrible terrible things and then when he said the word commission and pilot i realized i'd done wrong apologized took back what i said i would do with the mop and then um that was a guy called stephen serby who i believe is in bbc bristol now and i've never really truly thanked him enough because often lots of people are giving credit for finding me um and actually he he's the real one that found me um and uh yeah so thank you steven and and i mean you were off really weren't you we're moving rapidly now into the period of your life that everybody listening to this knows about because it you went off like a rocket although immediately you wanted control's not quite the right word is it because control can sound like control freakery but immediately you wanted agency yeah over everything that was good you could have been forgiven for biting their arm i don't think you wanted to call it um what was it you wanted to call the show in the first place before they convinced you to call it the naked chef oh forking gorgeous so it's you didn't have enough agency to get that one over the line no probably just as well in retrospect but it was an interesting one because like i when we were talking to the production people i said can i just write down what i want to do just because i'm not really interested in this and it was like two paragraphs and in there was stripping down restaurant food to its bare essentials so that's where the naked chef came from and the developer ran with that and um yeah i think um it was an interesting one i realized that um that i just it was i realized it was very hard to be yourself in that and maybe still parts or a lot of formal tv there was structure there was protocol the bbc had kind of invented cookery shows the first day that tv ever broadcast there was a cookery show and you do it this way and that way and i could see i could actually see problems even technically in the sense that the food would be dying on TV.

37:02Some food needs to be cooked and served. And if you muck about with it, it just looks terrible. So I kind of wanted to have agency. And really, I started doing my own productions, which I had no permit. I was so completely naive, but it did work. Because you're approaching television like you would later approach your restaurants. You're putting your heart and soul into it, so you don't want to leave anybody else. to um well you hear you hear people say in production and tv world like like normal people wouldn't know this but oh yeah we put the value on the screen we put the value on the screen and you'll hear like chefs say we put the value on the plate and i guess lots of industries might have that kind of metaphor but for me it was like um you know and again being dyslexic and loving to tell stories through imagery and and step by steps and and stop animation or slow motion or time lapses it's like oh my goodness like the different lenses can allow me to see things in different ways oh my god that lens like is more it's like that's like like a microscope and actually now i can see like structure of a leaf and i can now and if i'm going to pound it into a pesto like yes of course i want to release the natural oh my goodness so it's like and then of course you go to a wide shot where you can see three or four people and then like you go to a mid shot where you've kind of got like depth of field and it's it's working like the human eye so it feels like you're next to them instead of like observing from everything being in focus so i started to realize that these lenses and even the quality of the glass and even the fact that the best glass was now illegal because it had poisons in it to make the glass so you can't make it anymore um like you'd have to buy vintage glass to put on cameras and so yeah it was always like we were the first people to use 5ds on broadcast tv and the only reason that was is because i put it into a test which is an industry test for what you can broadcast and i swapped them so they they actually failed the industry standard panasonic and passed the 5d and then i told them and i proved it to them and then that that allowed us to use 5ds which was a game changer because we had 35 millimeter lenses we were the first people to ever use red cameras which was a kind of disruptive digital film format on broadcast TV.

39:09So we kind of always done it, really. Fighting, fighting for the close-up, fighting for the truth, fighting for the education. It's not just glamour. I mean, it does look beautiful as well, so there's a bit of glamour. There is vanity in there as well, but also it's, yeah, it's the clarity. I don't think it will be true now, but in the early years, people listening to this now or watching this now will be really stunned to discover that you had this level of interest in every single level of it because the public persona was someone who'd sort of walked through the wrong door and ended up on television.

39:44But from the very start, you were determined to get your head around almost, well, as many aspects of it as you possibly could. The books and the telly. Yeah. I think because I'd started Young Cooking, I could put to one side the practicalities of knowing a simple task. And even on a good day, they're simple tasks. You back yourself. yeah and i think then what you realize often in life is it's not like we said earlier it's just because you've got a good product doesn't mean anyone cares so like and also you can have the most genius thing at the wrong time and it's rubbish yeah you can have the most pathetic silly tiny thing that's got heart and soul and cuteness at the right time and it's genius you know so it's like so context is really like being emotionally sensitive to sort of realize that everyone's going to be used to amazing delicious things right now so i'm going to come up with something completely the opposite to sort of change the tone or timing or what have you done here so realizing that you can kind of play with the matrix to kind of create conversation it's a lovely way of putting it and and now you're off and you very quickly become a big success and people people will know much of this you and then 15 is the next big milestone really in the sense that being jamie oliver is not enough i want to give something to people who aren't yeah my eating my food or yeah where did that come from do you think honestly truly it was like i'd gone from being skint to having like a lot of money and i was still very young yeah and because of my mom and dad were such like hard working work income middle class people um had always earned a hard pound as anyone else in the restaurant industry does um i felt like a fake and i yeah i really did um and i come relatively easily because no one would believe me because they're like oh you're young and you're really and i literally look that even to this day i think i make one pound 20 a book right and and people it's really hard to sell books like for normal folk so it's not it's not really you don't and unless you're going to be prolific like you can't really have a career in it like so i didn't know i didn't know what i was doing i'd sold a million books before i knew it like and i'd gone from being skint to having money and i and i genuinely felt bad about it and i and also i had dreams and i was stupid enough and naive enough and romantic enough to have this idea of creating 15 which was a charity and i spent everything and actually not everything and even ran out of money and got saved thankfully by penguin um uh because it would have been called bankruptcy but i i didn't get there because they saved me with another royalty check but um 15 was one of it's probably my best moment ever it's probably the cleverest thing i've ever done it's probably the bravest i've maybe not the bravest but it was the most it's probably the most single-minded thing i've ever done and like pure youth unadulterated by experience and wisdom and conservative energy that has its place and is very valuable but just pure youth like i always used to say to journalists and they never got it and they also didn't believe it for a while took five years some maybe four years for them to stop saying the same thing and go actually i was wrong but um why did you do it i could i wanted to and i did so i could because i had the cash i wanted to well lots of young people have lots of dreams and they have lots of good ideas um and then doing it again like having an idea and doing it is you know so again i think it was those three things that really genuinely came together but 15 just brought nothing but magic into my life people must have tried to talk you out of it at the time yeah well well interestingly the most important person was my dad right because like he just didn't he he was like i think couldn't believe what was going on with his son could kind of was obviously proud of me along with mom but then like had this nest egg that i could have invested or done or bought some property or done you know and then i just basically i spent it on a charity and just thought i was bloody stupid and and and and and it was bloody stupid and he was doing exactly what a dad or I would do.

44:01And I'm sure many would agree. But he just couldn't see what I was in love with. And what I was in love with was the concept of transformation. How tough was it? Because I mean, the realization must have been that 15, particularly when somebody else tried to pick the candidates for the next cohort, to realize that you can't do this. Well, you can either do this forever, or you can do everything else, but you can't do both. yeah yeah i kind of the first sort of let's say two and a half years i was very involved yeah but obviously it was only powered by money that i earned doing other things and also there was like if you love something so dearly so much then as in a kind of parent or i wasn't a parent in that day actually i think about poppy probably was born around then so i was a young very young parent but i think like if you really love something then the only way it's going to be sustainable and it 15 was more about, it wasn't just about the one restaurant or me, it was about the values of how you teach disenfranchised kids.

45:02I owed it to them and it to get professionals in. And that's when the problem started. But there's obviously a happy medium between the two, which I had to educate myself in. But we'd got a lot right in those first two and a half years. For sure. Have you been back to Watergate Bay? Have you been back, Mark? So Watergate Bay was our second one. Yes. actually sorry our third we opened Amsterdam after that of course you did we were there for 14 years and then Watergate Bay for 14 years thereafter I can't go back because I have too many feelings I thought you'd say that I wonder if you'd say that I don't know it's a funny short story but when I opened Watergate Bay in Cornwall which again was 15 it was it was a charity we were buying 90 % of our product from 20 miles away and obviously we imported the Italian stuff I had bomb squad there when I opened because I was English Cockney apparently so we had bomb squad there because we had death threats from the from the terrorist there was a Cornish terrorist Cornish separatists anyway long story short I found out a year after that that I was like 400 years Cornish from Penzance Oliver's come from Olverton in Penzance and the guy that did the death threat who licked the stamp who got done for another crime was only second generation Cornish and came from up north.

46:26So you're out Cornish. But everyone that came to the launch were like, why is Bomb Squad here? Oh, don't worry. It's like, you know. Christ. And that probably applies to all of the stuff that you do outside of, I know that 15 is both inside and outside the kitchen, but I wanted to. I could and I did. It brings us into the school dinners. It brings us into the fizzy drinks. It brings us into the sugar stuff. I mean, your dad gets it now, presumably, but there must have been voices throughout your life saying why don't you just stop it with the social conscience stuff. I'd love to. Oh, my goodness, I'd love to.

47:04Yeah, I'd love to. And also what I would say is sort of like, I don't know how people would look at it, but I don't just relentlessly do it because it's a passion that's inside of me. I mean, I do have a very strong moral compass and I like to tell stories and try and make crazy stuff not happen and try and aspire for people to have hope and wish for better, certainly if they deserve it or it's owed to them. But what happened was as soon as I had spare cash, I started investing it in really good people around me. And lots of my team have been with me a very long time. And of course, you blink after 10, 15 years and what you have around you is a very maternal bunch of very loyal people that have the same values as you and are inspired by the same things as you and on the days when you've had enough of this bloody social change they're ready to go and they sort of push you and cuddle you and push you and and most of them probably only work for me because we we get to do quite agile things like when you've got the power of a documentary and when you know how to run campaigns and obviously when you don't waste your time doing stuff that's not important but stuff that is important it's a it's hard to get off it it's not like i'm mr goody to choose it's just that i have i have a stage and i have a kind of a lever and um i guess not in a sort of like get the violin there's i have such a long shopping list of stuff that i really want to get done and if i don't do it i feel guilty that i'm not doing my job and that's been with you since your childhood almost that sense of responsibility and duty how how do you decide what to do next on the list so the dyslexia project comes i mean though if it's a long list as you've just suggested then how do you decide right school dinners has to be next dyslexia has to be next sugar rush has to be next how obesity childhood but how do you how do you know which one how does it land and you know that this is what's going to be next well this is when dyslexic thinking or neurodiverse thinking comes into it because i kind of look at it as like being a dish a disco in a village hall right and you've got a mob come in and you got wicked pa unit you got you got amazing tracks infinite tracks but like you got light displays the whole lot but you've got to read the room so obviously from a sensible logical point of view you'd look at a pillar that has the best of science and public health and the belisha beacon that's saying help help this is crucial this is critical this is child health this is pregnant women this is x y and z um you go okay well that's a really important pillar but like the thing is then there's a pillar that's called the public and they're ready to hear certain things and this might be 10 years too early it might be two years too late and then there's another pillar called the press and the press whether you like them or hate them like i you know you i think i think you can have an honest relationship with them and they're not supposed to all like you but you can be honest with them and um and they can still trust you if they don't like you um they might be ready to tell stories or not and often they're powered by the things that are the problem so that's a bit of a problem behind the scenes i'll never say it but in the ad sales department that's a bit of an issue right so and then you've got another pillar called the government and politically like what are they ready for and and have you got politicians that want to do what they say they want to do which is make positive change because in my 20 years of doing it really they they they all say they'll talk a good game make us and we will right oh okay yeah every single one of them make us and we will the other thing they all say is what's the one thing i can do they always want to do one thing that fixes the problem one thing that's going to make a difference and of course if you're ever into the nuance or the reality or the truth of anything there's never one thing it's normally an environmental thing that's a patchwork quilt of a rainbow of issues and things that need to be plugged kissed helped cajules subs you know all that business so so you've got you you are applying pressure to every door on your shopping list i've got four pillars go on well that one so what i'm saying is those four pillars that i just described yeah yeah yeah just Just because it's the most important doesn't mean it gets through.

51:03Because you're waiting to feel which door might open. Yeah. When that door feels a bit... Right, that's where we're going next. And if the government don't want to do nothing, okay. I'll make a TV show. Probably if the press are ready for something, then the public can be brought with them, right? School dinners is a perfect example of that. And then you make... That was an oil tanker, wasn't it? You turned that round, but it was hard work for months and months and months. And some of the negativity must have taken you by surprise. It was relentless. Yeah, I mean, it was... Made me very angry that, mate.

51:30yeah but but then i think like sometimes you need to tell that story so people want to stick up for you they got to see you getting a kick in yes um and also part of the bad stories is also about the outcome of the public um response to those which starts a new conversation so it's a look it's a funny old bowl of spaghetti isn't it and there's no right or wrong way but i think really you realize that actually the government you want a government that can make change but they're really at the end of the pillar is it the same process when you're deciding what to turn your attention to next in the in the context actually of food and recipes when you're thinking right i'm going to have a look at that now or there's a i mean yeah not to sound cynical i don't mean that oh there's a gap in the market because if you're not enthusiastic about it you're not going to do that project definitely i mean i i have to be i refuse to but i have to because i am more prolific in cookbooks than anyone else um on the planet it's true which is a really disgusting thing to say but as it's a well because it's a fact i'll say it yeah but i'm not saying it to like um it's just counting and the truth is i don't really know how i do it okay and i'm not saying my cookbooks are for everyone but clearly a lot of people resonate um so again with a slightly neurodiverse sort of view i start a book in a room not dissimilar to this but it's glass and i put stickies everywhere so yeah that there's and there's patterns of things that people are getting excited by so i'll put some of those patterns of dishes or styles of cooking or flavors or ingredients i'll put that up there then there's sort of like places of comfort so food that makes you feel at home and homely and and like like because that so i'll build that world and then to make life even more complicated i studied nutrition about 10 years ago so then that means i am equally not just passionate about um what makes you really healthy and feel better and more optimal right which is essentially what this book is about but i also study death with great passion and that sounds really morbid but like it's i i know very accurately what most brits eat that's that's really weird because i i i was going to ask you about mortality next i was literally going to say do you think about mortality as a person can interview yourself next time no way um i i because I come from a pub I in my heart have a very um a really warm and devoted and loyal feeling towards community and and concepts of citizenship only not I'm not special because I grew up in a pub and because I saw community in its best form in my mum and dad's pub and mum and dad ran the pub so that it worked in a certain way so I only saw the best of my village and villages and I saw the most democratic place on earth without exception I saw travelers having great relationships with city boys with an e-type jag and a single malt I saw the cricket team the bowls team the OAPs the war veterans like everyone welcome everyone included so I think like I was and and you're also the center of the village so the fate and all the fundraising for this that and the other you know new windows in the church or whatever so that that those selection of feelings when i look at public when i look at basket data of britain right now it's really bad no one talks about it no one wants to talk about it because it's innately human to be optimistic like we are factually going towards um some of the darkest health places that the nhs is nowhere near able to cope with fact basket data doesn't lie everything else in the science of nutrition is based on equations made on bad data or average data at best right the only perfect data is basket data and it knows exactly how you are it knows pretty much when you're gonna die it knows if you're pregnant like it like or like basket data is what you buy religiously and and it's all there and it's the most precious information we've got and and it's being i i study it because i'm obsessed with how we can do better and britain's never cooked less than right now and we've also um never eaten less vegetables than 40 years i did not know that and conversely to the mediterranean and the mediterranean diet that has really good science and it's standing the test of time um like when people in the Mediterranean are finding hard times and are not as you know they're poor or poorer or less cash like veg sales do not go down protein goes down veg goes up beans goes up not in Britain right so so we've never we see veg as a side an extra so that we don't so we've got bad sales right now so obviously in the book hidden behind it honestly like the if you look at ingredients there's a few ways to look at ingredients like when you study nutrition and when you study the human body like the body's amazing it can deal with terrible terrible thrashing and harassment breathing drinking eating booze not let alone the emotional side of stuff um so it can handle a lot a lot but not as much as we're giving it from basket data no way jose so when i look at ingredients When I look at herbs, spices, fruit, veg, nuts, seeds, you know, beans, like quality proteins, I don't see ingredients as a nutritionist.

57:24I see chemistry. This is chemistry that will allow you, James O 'Brien, to be the very best that you really, really can be. And Billy from Bognor and Sheila from Sheffield. Sure. Right. And so, like, health stats are showing that we're all deficit in fiber. And you can say, oh, fiber, you know, like, you know, that's good for, you know, keeping you regular. um like you know fiber is like essential for like critical interact you know if if we get more fiber through fruit veg and beans mental health you're going to see lower fact you know cardiovascular you know sort of like diet related disease you're going to see improve fact you know it's cheap you know like it's it's you you're talking with the same levels of passion and enthusiasm that you would have been talking about and with your first book or your or your first project on you You just wait for that moment where this is what I'm here to do.

58:18Yeah, 100%. And what's really upsetting is you can look at them in silos of information. Basket data is a set of skills. And certain people that never talk to anyone else, they'll try and talk to agency to sort of make... Really, people that deal in data try and regurgitate it to sell more stuff. But actually, it's not just data, it's what you do with it. And actually, there's some really beautiful things to be done with data. really helpful civic public health initiatives and collaborations laws and communications that could help britain really get out of this dark place that we're in and then from the other side you've got you know working with farmers and how you help them and how you interact with them you it's you can go really deep you can you can improve soil quality and soil health and then therefore the food health and there's no national um like procurement system for for schools or hospitals or old people's homes we could love our farmers much more by having a ministry of food that we had in the war we haven't got that we just it's all like jobs worth it's all separate silos of talent no one's joining the dots of actually like the french the french are quite interesting i'm not saying they're perfect but their national health as in public health is globally interestingly healthy and and they can consume like higher amounts of salt and fat fat fats than than us but they're healthier they have healthier outcomes how because the whole picture of what they're eating is better but also culturally not a law they have a slower lunch yes right they fight and this is one example from school onwards that they have like in a factory working class people will have a long lunch in schools they have three courses we're now proving in science that eating slowly is more healthy not wolfing something eating slowly you can metabolize nutrients in a more efficient way and and they don't get just set in the body as fat straight away you know so we're seeing all these um just chewing more chewing more like it's not just when you're chewing it's not just chewing more in the first stage of digestion through your saliva through amylase and also it's code chemistry code to your gut this this is coming down the hole incoming and then so because we're not chewing much because a lot of processed foods like this is why our bodies are in utter chaos so as you can see this jamie oliver is so weird it's like it's like nerdy you're doing what you always do you're making it make sense and you're making it sound urgent which is why eat yourself healthy is not a title yeah that's the jazz hands of kind of like it can be joyful it can be and you can eat yourself healthy you can eat yourself healthy without living on mung beans yeah and i mean i i would say there's i think there's a thing that they can sign up for online that's free it's the two-week kickstarter and um if you followed that like i'm talking about the average brit here if you don't feel great if you don't feel 100 percent if you feel a bit foggy if you feel you could be better physically mentally like sadness levels this that and the other if you follow if you follow that kickstarter i don't do this i personally would just go lunch and dinner you can have breakfast lunch and dinner go lunch and dinner if you smash if you've got it in you to do it for two weeks i think that you those two weeks will arm you with principles that will arm you for the rest of your life you'll learn stuff you'll get confident with stuff and then you can rattle your own version of stuff in your own way and style out your cooking you'll save money right and nutritionally the chemistry that goes into you will help you help yourself you don't need anyone else largely like like you can help you help yourself and also because generally speaking we all need to shift a bit of timber you will get it by having the lunch and the dinner because you'll be deficit enough and you will after two weeks you will feel differently and i'll put money on it so i think like that's you can sign up to that for free somewhere online i don't know just put jamie kickstarter meal plan like it's in there and this is stuff you can buy from a regular supermarket now i know most people are not going to do that because they're asking for someone two weeks is nothing but most people won't do that i'm telling you if you do do it if you do it as a challenge forget me i've got nothing to do with it if you can do it like signing up to walk the three peaks or whatever things you run around or this if you can do that the investment that you will give yourself physically and mentally and the capacity for you to effortlessly go on a journey that effortlessly makes you healthier and richer i promise and and i believe it and um i think you'll be quite proud of yourself eat yourself healthy is is on your tellies and in your bookshops at the moment but the kickstarter is available online as jamie said for free um thank you thank you more

1:03:17This is a Global Player original podcast.