Fabulous Fanny Cradock: TV's Outrageous Queen of Cuisine

While Fanny Cradock cut a controversial figure – berating Margaret Thatcher for wearing ‘cheap shoes and clothes’, writing off Eamonn Andrews as a ‘blundering amateur’ and famously being forced to apologise for insulting a housewife cook on The Big Time – her cookery programmes were enormously popular.

Dressed in evening gown, drop earrings and pearls, donning thick make-up, she boomed orders to her partner Johnnie, a gentle, monocled stooge who was portrayed as an amiable drunk. The programmes were watched by millions and were hugely influential: the Queen Mother told Fanny that she and Johnnie were ‘mainly responsible’ for the improvement in catering standards since the war; Keith Floyd declared that ‘she changed the whole nation’s cooking attitudes’; for Esther Rantzen ‘she created the cult of the TV chef’.

Lavishly illustrated and illuminated by amusing facts and anecdotes, Fabulous Fanny Cradock paints a fun, entertaining portrait of this extraordinary woman.

• | Author: Clive Ellis
• | Publisher: The History Press Ltd
• | Publication Date: Nov 16, 2023
• | Number of Pages:
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• | Binding: Paperback / softback
• | ISBN-13: 9781803995328
• | ISBN-10: 1803995327