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. In 2022, I watched a lot of Keith Floyd's old TV shows out of interest, having known him when alive. Although we used to know Keith before he was famous, I had never actually watched any of his TV series until then.

I thought the first two series, Floyd on Fish, and Floyd on Food, were quite interesting, despite being rather low budget, but then the quality of his series dropped off a lot. My impressions of Keith had been rather bad, since a lot of the food I'd eaten at his restaurant was poorly prepared, and in one case it was absolutely inedible, and he seemed to be a fairly obnoxious man who spent most of his time complaining about things which were his own fault.

About Keith and his moods

My father Douglas Bullock had been quite friendly with Keith in the 1970s and 1980s. 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 video, which shows Keith 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. However, that wasn't the case. Keith could be exactly as unpleasant and whiny as you see him being on the "Keith meets Keith" programme when he was in his thirties, before he'd ever been on TV, and before he got ill. It was just not recorded on camera anywhere for his usual TV shows.

Before I met him, in the early 1970s, he had been running some restaurants around Clifton in Bristol such as "Floyd's Bistro", and these had gone bust due to Keith's lack of business skill, and Keith left the UK for France. At that time, he had sold the businesses and the right to the names "Floyd" to someone, and a regular feature of Keith's conversation at the time I saw the most of him, 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, 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, such as the one with the Japanese woman who ran a restaurant in Bath. The scenes with her and Keith cooking together, seen in "Floyd On Food" from 1986, were filmed in the Chandos Road restaurant's kitchen. (I've tried to find a link to the video which I saw on Youtube, but it seems to have disappeared again. These videos are mostly copyrighted, so sometimes removed from Youtube.)

A friend of mine from school called Andrew Free lived just down the end of Chandos Road and apparently his mother urged him to try to get a job in Keith's restaurant. Fortunately Free had enough sense to go and work in a shop called "Target Electronics" rather than fall into Floyd's clutches.

Regarding Keith's Jekyll-and-Hyde mood changes, I experienced it several times. He'd be quite 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 made the grevious error of telling him 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.

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.

Can Keith cook?

Regarding Keith's cooking skill, I have no evidence at all that he was even competent, and the TV series don't seem to provide it either. 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. It was so bad that I could hardly eat any of it.

I didn't watch Keith's cookery shows when they were first broadcast, but when I watched them recently, I didn't see anything which looked like exceptional cooking skill. In fact the vast majority of the dishes Keith cooks on camera consist of "bunging" various ingredients 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?

This is, however, Just My Opinion. At the time we knew Keith, I'd hear people calling him "the maestro" or something, and I remember my stepbrother Mike commenting very favourably on the food, and other people seemed very enthusiastic, but not everybody. My father had his wedding reception in Keith's restaurant, and my father's second wife, Jackie (Mike's mother), actually cooked and brought trays of vol-au-vents to her own wedding reception. She evidently didn't trust Keith to prepare it. I remember that all Keith had done for the wedding reception 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.

But, as I mentioned, many people rated Keith's cooking highly. Before he was famous, Keith wrote a cookbook called "Floyd's food", and Leonard Rossiter (the actor who played Reginald Perrin) wrote the introduction, on the basis that Rossiter was coming to his restaurant so often. My father was friends with Keith at the time and he put loads of copies of "Floyd's food" on display at the counter of his shop.

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, as far as I know.

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. He might have been 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.

On the video "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 actually asked Keith to be on TV after seeing him throw out some customers from the restaurant on Chandos Road, so he possibly chose Keith because he wanted someone who was a bit controversial or confrontational for the TV value.

On other videos on the Floyd on Food channel, Keith often complains about the customers who'd come to his restaurant, and he seems to have been a terrific 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.

If you're interested in my comments on Keith Floyd's TV shows, I reviewed them for IMDB, but since then I closed the IMDB account due to censorship, so the reviews are gone from there. I've kept them on this site, and at some point I will probably tidy them up a bit.