Gary Rhodes wasn’t the first TV chef by any means, but he was certainly one of the most influential. Look at all the big names operating today – Gordon, Jamie, Rick, Heston – and you can draw a line from all of them back to Gary Rhodes.
Before Rhodes, there were television cooks like Delia Smith or Fanny Cradock; excellent communicators with a direct line to the nation’s housewives. Even Keith Floyd, the closest thing to a Rhodes prototype, refused to call himself a chef due to his lack of training. But Rhodes was a chef through and through. Before his TV career even began, he had earned a Michelin star at the age of 26 and worked as the head chef at the Greenhouse, a Mayfair restaurant best known for reviving modern British classics, where he’d later earn another.
Not only did he have the credentials of a chef, but also the attitude. After a single appearance on a Keith Floyd episode from 1988, he quickly became the breakout personality on the daytime cookery show Hot Chefs, thanks in part to his habit of impatiently shouting at his sous chef whenever something wasn’t to his standard. This shtick would subsequently be finessed to a high sheen by Gordon Ramsay.
From there, Rhodes took flight. His 1994 series Rhodes Around Britain was as influential as food television gets. Despite his Michelin star, the Radio Times billed him as “an ordinary sort of bloke” – putting in motion the sequence of events that would lead us to Jamie Oliver – plus its big gimmick was Rhodes’ fascination with the unfashionable world of British cuisine. There is an argument that his focus on this directly inspired the menu of every gastropub in the country. The travelogue structure of this show was also subsequently pinched wholesale by Rick Stein.
Within a year, Rhodes was a superstar. He’d turn up in the epicentre of the mainstream, with appearances on The Generation Game, Noel’s House Party and This Is Your Life. He had a childrens’ show based on the food of Roald Dahl. He presented MasterChef. And he continued making his signature cookery shows like Open Rhodes, Classic Rhodes, Gary Rhodes, Gary Rhodes’ New British Classics, Gary Rhodes: Cookery Year.
There is also an argument that he helped push the more mercenary aspect of television cheffing. He published cookbook after cookbook, brought out ranges of cookware and bread mixes. And he was impressively unrestrained when it came to advertising, too; appearing in commercials for Tate & Lyle, and subsequently on every single sugar sachet in the country. He even got banned from TV, thanks to a misleading Flora advert where he drove around in a camper van topped with a giant fibreglass crumpet.
Eventually he was outpaced by the culture he helped to inspire, popping up here and there on Saturday Kitchen and Great British Chefs, surrounded by younger chefs who all owed him an enormous debt of gratitude. He did Strictly, and then he all but disappeared from our screens entirely.
Plenty of obituaries today refer to Rhodes as a spiky-haired scoundrel and little more, but that is to do him a huge disservice. He may be gone, but his fingerprints are still all over television.
