5:43pm Thursday 4th March 2010
By Andrew Mosley
I QUITE like Michael Winner. He made rubbish films, his insurance adverts are terrible, but somehow he managed a long-term relationship with Jenny Seagrove and he once ordered his chauffeur to stop while I crossed a road in London, enthusiastically waving me on in the process.
The premise of this is not dissimilar to that of the Hairy Bikers’ recent effort, only Winner visits the homes of normal families, who cook for him and he either awards them no stars, one, two or three.
Anyway, the rude Sunday Times restaurant critic has to leave his 46-bedroom West London mansion to travel up North in the first episode and he’s not entirely happy at the prospect.
His staff, Dinah and Joan, do his hair and make-up and accompany him on the trip to hell. “The North isn’t a place I frequently go to. It’s an alien country. It’s a beautiful place and the people are nice, but they are incapable of cooking,” he says with a twinkle in his eye as he checks out the region on a map.
First up he goes to Longridge in the Ribble Valley, where Justine will cook him a prawn cocktail, beef wellington and strawberry pavlova.
“There’s a phrase ‘it’s grim up North’ and a lot of the places in the North I have been to are very grim. In fact, grim is a kindness,” he offers en route to flat cap and bitter country.
He visits a pub and sends his food back, before finally making it to Justine’s house. She informs him that she has lost 10 stones in a year, to which Michael responds: “You must have been absolutely enormous. Big must have been a hard word to describe you.” Equally, tactful would not be one you would choose when referring to old Mikey boy.
Anyway, he scoffs all that is proferred and demands one of Justine’s fabled chocolate brownies, which he labels “perfect”.
So it’s on to Wilmslow, and prawns and spicy mango salsa, curried goat and rum, raisin and almond tart with passion fruit ice-cream at Dean’s.
Mick tells Dean’s family: “I had the good sense to be born to very rich parents, so from the age of five I was eating the very finest food.” It’s all right for some.
Amusingly, the family present Winner with a flat cap, which he seems to appreciate.
A week later they all gather in a plush London cinema for Winner to deliver his verdict, which is Dean no stars and Justine one. Dean is understandably upset and says Winner will find no home cooks capable of delivering restaurant standard food. But he’s missing the point and, if Dean believes that, he shouldn’t have taken part.
Winner awards Justine a star and it happens — he cries, moved by the story of her son’s heart condition and daughter’s cerebral palsy. The man’s a big softy after all.
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