My recollections of Keith Floyd

This page is an outgrowth of some comments I left on a Youtube video called "Keith Meets Keith", which I've embedded in the text below. I've since deleted the comments on Youtube. Keith Floyd was a friend of my father's and we fairly regularly visited his restaurant before he became a famous TV chef. I didn't like the food at his restaurant, and in some cases it was completely inedible, and I found Keith quite unpleasant, with very unpredictable dark moods, so I never really watched many of his cookery shows until 2022, when for some reason I watched a lot of Keith Floyd's old TV shows on Youtube.

I thought the first series, Floyd on Fish, Floyd on Food, and Floyd on Britain and Ireland were quite interesting, despite being rather low budget, but then the quality of his series dropped off a lot. (Almost all of the videos have now been removed from Youtube again, presumably for copyright violation. You can find most of "Floyd on Food", "Floyd on Fish", and "Floyd on Britain and Ireland" as well as the later series on Dailymotion.)

About Keith and his moods

My father Douglas Bullock had been quite friendly with Keith in the 1970s and 1980s, I think because he and Keith had quite similar interests in food, fashion and wine, and also both Francophiles. (My father used to call French people "frognosealiens" for some reason, and Keith also uses this word in his TV series. Google is a complete blank for this word, or was until this is uploaded.) My father described him as his "drinking companion".

The first time I met Keith was in the south of France around the 1970s. I remember that we had takeaway pizza at some kind of wine bar, and although I don't remember it, I had a diary entry in my "holiday diary" which consisted of remarks about the large amounts of wine which Keith and my father drank. My father was also one of Keith's 500-pound people, who paid Keith a 500 pound loan before he opened his restaurant in Chandos Road in the 1980s, to be paid back in meals eaten, and, according to one of Keith's autobiographies my father, who was quite handy, had done some work fitting out his earlier restaurants in Clifton.

I wrote the comments originally because people under the "Keith meets Keith" video, which shows Keith Floyd getting into a very bad mood and generally being extremely unpleasant, were remarking that Keith's illness, seen in the video, had affected him badly. They thought he'd become cantankerous due to the illness. But Keith could be just as unpleasant and whiny when he was in his thirties, before he'd ever been on TV, and before he got ill.

In the early 1970s, he ran restaurants around Clifton in Bristol such as "Floyd's Bistro". These had gone bust apparently due to Keith's lack of business skill, and Keith left the UK for France, where I first met him. He had sold the right to the name "Floyd" to someone, and a regular feature of Keith's conversation in the early 1980s was endless whinging and whining about how this person would not let him use the name "Floyd" for his new restaurant on Chandos Road in Redland, despite no longer running the restaurant itself. So Keith would sit in the garden of the restaurant and whine on and on about the name of his restaurant, along with coming up with ideas like calling it "Pink" or just having the word "restaurant" on the sign.

Originally the Chandos Road restaurant did not have an alcohol licence, so Keith let people bring their own bottle of wine to drink with their meal. Eventually he ended up complaining and whining about this too, since people continued bringing their bottles even after he got a licence. Incidentally the restaurant on Chandos Road features in some of the early BBC TV shows.

Keith was sometimes the fun person you see in the "Floyd on ..." programmes. The singalongs in the "Keith meets Keith" video remind me of what we used to see at Keith's place on Chandos Road in Bristol. Keith loved singing songs with his son, who was about four or five I think. I remember the two of them singing "High Hopes" by Frank Sinatra.

But he was also prone to terrible moods and outbursts of unexpected anger. I experienced Keith's Jekyll-and-Hyde mood changes several times. One moment he'd be jovial and charming, like the Keith Floyd you see on television, and then he suddenly turned into "extremely unpleasant Keith". I never saw Keith go from unpleasant Keith back to jovial Keith though. Some of his obituaries mentioned his mood swings. See this Keith Floyd obituary at The Guardian for example.

One conversation with Keith I remember things turning sour mid-conversation. He started off in a very jovial tone saying "Ben, I will cook you anything you want. Just tell me what you want and I'll cook it for you!" (I suppose this apparent act of generosity was related to the loan he'd got from my father.) I made the grevious error, instead of telling him I wanted smoked salmon with poached escargots, or fillet mignon with truffle sauce, or some other such dish, of saying that I wanted Greek meatballs, and the winds of change started blowing, and Keith's face darkened, he scowled and made a sideways look of disgust and contempt, and muttered "I'm not going to make meatballs for you". Anyway, later on, after Keith was famous, I had a look through his one of his cookbooks, and was not too surprised to find a recipe for the despised meatballs in there.

I don't think Keith even bothered writing the recipe books which accompanied his TV series himself, he hired a ghostwriter and just put his name on the book. From what I've heard, the recipe books were actually the main source of income from the TV shows, over and above the fee paid by the television company. It's more than a little ironic to me that Keith, who used to have a column in "The News of the World" in the 1980s, complains bitterly in the video about television chefs who simply benefit from their celebrity without contributing cooking knowledge, since I don't think he contributed much beyond his name and a few photos for most of those fake cookery books.

Polly, Keith's daughter, whom I've never met, says in the "Keith meets Keith" video that she hadn't talked to her father for ten years. My father said he was an amazing improvisational cook, and helped Keith in various ways, but he fell afoul of Keith after Keith claimed that my father was speaking ill of him behind his back, and they ended up not speaking again.

Could Keith cook?

Regarding Keith's cooking skill, I have no evidence at all that he was even competent. We had any number of meals at Keith's restaurant, and I thought the food was awful. The dish I remember as a low point was a badly cooked, stringy piece of rabbit with a cloying, very thick wine sauce about the consistency of marmite, with what seemed to be lumps of flour in it. It was so bad that I could hardly eat any of it.

My father had his wedding reception in Keith's restaurant, and my father's second wife, Jackie, actually cooked and brought trays of vol-au-vents. She evidently didn't trust Keith to prepare it. All Keith had done was to line up a few bottles of alcoholic drinks and a few bowls of olives, which seemed a bit pathetic for a chef running a wedding reception.

As I didn't like Keith very much or find his cooking very good, I didn't watch Keith's cookery shows when they were first broadcast. The first time I actually watched one of Keith's TV shows was around the 1990s, when I was trying to impress someone by telling her I knew a TV star, and we watched a TV show with Keith in Thailand or somewhere like that. I was amazed at the poor quality of it. Then around 2022, having a bit of experience cooking, I started to wonder if had got it wrong about Keith, and I watched everything I could find on Youtube, including the early series.

In none of the shows did I see anything which looked like exceptional cooking skill. The majority of the dishes Keith cooks on camera consist of putting a few ingredients clearly prepared by someone other than Keith into a frying pan, complete with exasperating comments on the "lovely" olive oil or the "wonderful" green peppers or the "fabulous" onions, and then cooking the ingredients in a fairly random, haphazard fashion, often with disastrous consequences. Where is cooking skill displayed in any of it?

In the comments on the Youtube videos of Keith's old shows, in between the comments about what a great bloke / cook / character / lad / original / one-of-a-kind Keith was from people I'm sure never met him, or met him once, and almost certainly never ate any food that he cooked, you'll find many dark comments noting the very basic errors in his cooking techniques, such as using the wrong parts of a knife or failing to cook onions properly. But other comments remark on what an inspiration Keith was or how much they enjoyed his TV programmes.

At the time we knew Keith, when we went to his restaurant, I'd hear people like his friend Enoch calling him "the maestro", and I remember my stepbrother Mike (Jackie's son) commenting very favourably on the food.

Before he was famous, in the early 1980s, Keith wrote a cookbook called "Floyd's food", and Leonard Rossiter (the actor who played Reginald Perrin) wrote the introduction, because Rossiter was coming to his restaurant so often. My father put piles of copies of "Floyd's food" on display at the main counter of his shop.

(I used to own a copy of Floyd's Food which I found in Oxfam for 25p, but unfortunately I discarded it at some point. I remember a recipe for jam doughnuts consisting of making a jam sandwich and then frying it, and something about how it was important to cut the "nasty" white parts of peppers out and discard them before using the pepper, among other more or less useless recipes.)

My father claimed that, at the time they were friendly, Keith would come back to the house that he lived in with Jackie and whip up some improvisational dish out of the few ingredients he had left, although I strongly doubt it, since I doubt Jackie would have let Keith cook things in their kitchen. I think my father was probably thinking of the time he was living alone in a flat over his shop in 167 Whiteladies Road, or the smaller shop in Waterloo Street.

In "Keith Meets Keith", David Pritchard, the producer and director of the early "Floyd on Fish" and "Floyd on Food" BBC TV shows, says that he asked Keith to be on TV after seeing him throw out some customers from the restaurant on Chandos Road, so he may have chosen Keith because he wanted someone who was a bit controversial or confrontational for the TV value.

On other videos, Keith complains about the customers who'd come to his restaurant. He seems to have been a snob, complaining about people who wore medallions, drove Porsches, and ordered Campari or Remi Martin. I suppose even those flashy people might have enjoyed Keith's cooking, and kicking them out of his restaurant and insulting them might have been bad for business, since they seemed to have some money.

Other

• My contribution to the Wikipedia biography of Keith Floyd. Some of the text survives to the present day.