THE MIDNIGHT HOUR IS CLOSE AT HAND [477]

I have anticipated this for a while, but I will need to continue anticipating for a few more days.

I was intending to discuss Vincent Price’s “Cooking Price-Wise”, a series made for Thames Television, and released on Blu-ray by the British Film Institute for its first public view since its original broadcast in 1971. I have only seen a few seconds of this show, played in another TV show from over twenty years ago, but I have been given a copy of the tie-in book, expanded and reissued by the Price family in 2017, subtitled “A Culinary Legacy”. I was looking forward to discovering what kind of experience is created when watching a cooking show hosted by an icon of horror cinema.

However, I ordered the disc via Amazon.co.uk, where messages of the package being out for delivery were replaced by an apology for its having been sent to Leeds, two hundred miles away from me. Therefore, I am taking the opportunity, created by misplaced logistics, to explore why I anticipate watching Vincent Price cook a turkey.

I don’t know if Vincent Price was typecast by his appearance in horror films, in both the United States and the UK, or by how effective his voice was in a horror context. To be absolutely honest, he was also so much of an Anglophile that I didn’t realise he was American, proving my apparent inability to place his accent – in an appearance on Thames’ “Today” discussion show in 1972, Price tells Eamonn Andrews that he is a great fan of British food, like steak and kidney pie, and beans on toast, “because I don’t have to eat it all the time!”

But Price had almost a parallel career as a gourmet cook, releasing three books of recipes in the 1960s with his then-wife Mary Grant Price. Like The Monkees’ Michael Nesmith’s mother inventing correction fluid, Price’s grandfather, Dr Vincent Clarence Price, invented baking powder – the expanded “Cooking Price-Wise” featured a few pages from this Vincent Price’s own cookbook, reminding you to “Use Dr Price’s Phosphate Baking Powder” at the top of each page. In the same interview with Andrews, Price said the aim of his series the previous year was “to tell the British housewife that there are very common things, like potatoes, that can be done superbly, and with just as little effort as they put into it ordinarily”.

In 1971, cooking shows were more on the fringes of TV schedules than is expected today – no landmark series with Delia Smith, no combined travelogues with Keith Floyd or Rick Stein. Confined to a kitchen set, the likes of Fanny Cradock will present instructional series that will be found on weekend mornings, alongside similar programmes on woodwork or learning a language, or just as TV channels reopened in the late afternoon, or before they closed down for the night. Cradock did have primetime series as early as 1968, but on the more deliberately specialist BBC Two – repeats on BBC One were again at the fringes of its schedule. “Cooking Price-Wise”, despite its presenter and its aim, was therefore relegated to about 11.15pm or 11.30pm on a Tuesday on Thames for six weeks in April and May 1971, again before closedown – I could not find any evidence that the rest of the ITV network ever showed it outside of the Greater London and Home Counties area.

I have never cooked a recipe from “Cooking Price-Wise”, but then I own a copy of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s “The Futurist Cookbook”, and I have never wanted to cook anything from that either. Perhaps it was that one clip of the TV show I have seen, which was of Price filling several pastry pockets with olives and other ingredients – I have been unable to find the clip since seeing it, or the TV show that included it. 

Time might be the problem, as British tastes have developed in the decades since the show was made – olive oil doesn’t have to be bought in a chemist anymore, and wine and hummus are actually consumed here now. What doesn’t help is the pictures provided of some recipes, practically screaming that they were from another time, when things were done differently – it may be that hearing and seeing someone explain them to you will make them more palatable. I will have to try one of them now – my copy of the book keeps opening at the minestrone for some reason, but Sardinian Gnocchi may be worth a go.

I hope watching “Cooking Price-Wise” will be as rewarding as I have built it up to be, when my copy of it arrives.

OH WHAT WILL I BE BELIEVING [58]

Logo #1

Firstly, a big thank you to you all for reading what has been quite a bewildering year’s worth of subjects. When I began “Dancing with the Gatekeepers,” on 30^th May 2016, my intention has always been to understand each subject that came to mind each week, and to learn something from it, confirming why the most popular articles so far range wildly from David Bowie to Donald Trump, from Quorn to the Futurist Cookbook, from big data to “legal names,” from George Orwell to word puzzles, and from the art of telling a joke to the history of the word “ain’t.”

If anyone has sought to find out more, or ask a question about something, or someone, having read my work here, then that is the best possible outcome – I only write because I am happy to admit I don’t have all the answers.

However, the first subject I featured, on how John Lennon’s flippant remark to a journalist’s question became, at the insistence of Yoko Ono, the inspired dream of a man on a flaming pie, telling Lennon to name his band, “The Beatles, with an ‘a.’” Once you know something is untrue, the persistent insistence that “ceci n’est pas une pipe” becomes a deranged fantasy. When it comes to cold facts, those that mean the world works on a base level, you should not the use joke in René Magritte’s painting “The Treachery of Images” as a way to live your life or, even worse, assert your point of view over those of others.

The two words of the last year have been “Brexit” and “Trump.” Even if I look back on this article in twenty, thirty, fifty years, I will not need any further explanation than that, and I don’t expect you may not either. I have tried not to advance a particular view about either of these – politically, I am in the centre, so if the world is substantively better for everyone after Brexit and Trump, then that is fine by me – but the one thing I should not have to be, if I did say anything about either subject, is afraid to say anything at all.

Freedom of speech is paramount in this world – all opinions should be able to be heard, then we can decide on their merit. I am not the type of person who tells people that the truth is being kept from them, or that they are blind to it, because I would need to have concrete evidence to prove that, unless I wanted to engage in conspiracy theory. When certain voices think they have been silenced, because one outlet decides they don’t want them there anymore, they should think whether that place has its own voices to protect, or whether they might have been in the wrong place to begin with. Every voice has its own place and, if requires, what it says can be tested, in a court of law.

I wrote a great number of notes for what I wanted to write about here, and quite a few of them could become their own discussion here in future weeks. It is a febrile time for thought about our own places in the world, having felt that everything has been turned upside down. However, I feel safe that things will work out better for everyone in the end, even if I don’t know why - that might just be me.

The dream that gave me the name “Dancing with the Gatekeepers” was my having recorded an album, rock and/or electronic in nature, in which one song led to my shouting “all you have are words” over and over again. Despite what others may choose to do with their words, they are all I have too.

Good luck, everyone.