KEITH FLOYD:KEITH FLOYD, who has died of a heart attack aged 65, will be best remembered for his television cookery programmes in the late 1980s and early 1990s. They were the epitome of gonzo TV as wine destined for the pot was drunk instead by Floyd.
Cheerful mayhem was the consequence, though attentive viewers learned sound basics of flavour and technique. Floyd’s performances, on or near the stove, were a refreshing departure from the prissy, controlled style then in favour at the BBC, or the alternative mode of half an hour with a French chef whose English rendered the recipes a mystery.
Floyd came to public notice after a long and, he would have said, punishing apprenticeship running restaurants. He was brought up on the slopes of the Quantock Hills and Exmoor in Somerset, southwest England, hence, perhaps, his love of game, fishing and the odd rook for the pot. He was educated at Wellington school, Somerset, where a fellow pupil was the author and former Conservative MP Jeffrey Archer.
After an abortive career in journalism, Floyd joined the army, gaining a commission in the 3rd Royal Tank Regiment in 1963. His own account would have his rush of military blood inspired by the heroics of Stanley Baker and Michael Caine in the film Zulu, though in fact that film was not released until 1964. In reality, his regiment was stationed in Germany where, though but a subaltern, his responsibilities extended to the meals in the officers’ mess. Those nights he was on duty the cooks were encouraged to produce highfalutin French dishes in preference to roast meat and two veg.
His catering skills, however, did nothing to prolong his military career, which was soon abandoned for a stint of kitchen portering and restaurant work in London and France, before returning to the west country in 1966. Somehow, and somewhere, he had learned enough about cookery to open Floyd’s Bistro and two other restaurants in Bristol, in the Georgian district of Clifton, where posh people and broadcasters lived.
Floyd was a natural cook of great skill, restaurateur and host of effervescent charm. However, he was an appalling businessman who rarely kept hold of his money for long enough to pay the bills that mattered, while often charging his customers over the odds for his wares.
His perception of the ambivalent role of the restaurateur – somewhere between pander and provider – was clear and forcefully expressed, sometimes too forcefully for his own good. His first Bristol period ended in the sale of the restaurants in the early 1970s. Floyd then set sail in his yacht, Flirty, to lotus-eat in the Mediterranean for a couple of years.
When money got tight, he began exporting antiques to France and importing wine into England. Then, when in turn the customs regulations became tight, he opened his own small restaurant in the provencal town of L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue. Not far from Avignon, its main claim to fame is the greatest concentration of antique shops in mainland France (300 and counting).
When he did return to Bristol in 1979-80, it was without a penny. He was only able to go back into business, with another restaurant called Floyd’s, courtesy of friends who stumped up the capital.
Extravagance, incompetence and the VAT bill would have done for him a third and even final time had he not been rescued by unlikely fame in broadcasting.
The chain of coincidence began with a small book from a local publisher called Floyd's Food(1981, with a foreword by the actor Leonard Rossiter), which led to 10-minute recipe chats on the Bristol station Radio West; these in turn developed into a short-lived yet garrulous phone-in.
By then something of a local hero, he was tried out on TV, where his first foray culminated with him roasting a guinea fowl complete with giblets in their plastic bag. More successful was a short film of him cooking made by David Pritchard, then at BBC Bristol. This might have come to nothing had not Pritchard been relocated to Plymouth and able to propose a new series on fish cookery. A pilot show was made at the end of 1984 and Floyd on Fish went out in the summer of 1985.
Inspired by chaos, Floyd would address the crew as often as the camera, would drink as programmes wore on, and would would be lovably madcap. Yet the cookery content was red-hot, copper-bottomed stuff.
If his media life seemed a treadmill – it included a one-man show complete with piano and vocal backing – he still found time at the beginning of the 1990s to start another restaurant.
This was the pub the Maltsters Arms (rechristened Floyd’s Inn) in a hamlet near Dartmouth, in Devon. There he drove his white convertible Bentley through narrow lanes, got married for the third time, to Shaunagh Mullet (though she left him after he accused her of forgetting his 50th birthday), and built up colossal debts. They were cleared by a distress sale, in 1996, after which he settled in Kinsale, Co Cork, for a number of years. A fourth marriage followed, to Theresa Smith (which also ended in divorce), and removal to Marbella, before a return to Provence.
A life that seemed punctuated by bankruptcy and bust-ups was nonetheless full of achievement and hard work: 19 series for television, 25 books, not to mention a good dozen restaurants.
A son, Patrick, from his first marriage, and a daughter Poppy, from his second, survive him.
Keith Floyd: born December 28th, 1943; died September 14th, 2009