19.09.2007
Class cookery
Lawrence Parker reviews Nigella Express (BBC2 Mondays, 8pm)
Before watching this series I was not aware that celebrity chef Nigella Lawson harboured a secret. You see, dear reader, Nigella is just like us. As the working mother of two children she has an intensely busy life and gets only limited time to cook. But don't panic. She has had time to make this new series for BBC2 that lets you into her secrets of cooking yummy food at breakneck pace.
I am immensely comforted by all this; like Nigella, I spend far too much time in Selfridges and Fortnum & Mason, and was pretty desperate to find the time to heat up a Fray Bentos pie in the microwave. After fearing that one of her previous BBC shows - Nigella's Christmas kitchen (2006) - might be a harbinger of a ruthless fascist coup, I am genuinely pacified by the idea of "good food fast".
More seriously though, can Nigella, who could unkindly be thought of as a 'posh bird serving posh food', bring this one off? Can someone with an estimated personal fortune of £1.7 million, the daughter of former Conservative cabinet minister Nigel Lawson and now wife of Charles Saatchi, really reach out and become truly hegemonic in our cynical age? Can she hell.
Actually, the Italian food on this week's episode did seem to fit the 'express food' bill and I may even try a dish of pasta with lemon mushrooms at the weekend. But I have to say that, leaving the food aside, the presentation as a whole cuts completely against its 'Nigella's a normal, busy working mum' sell.
'Nigella' as a brand is omnipotent. Do you know anyone else who has a lime-green casserole dish that matches her cardigan? She is notoriously famous for her sexual innuendoes. As Nigella was squeezing a lemon she said: "I love a bit of impaling" (at which point you could feel the whole of the home counties launch itself into a kind of collective swoon). This is fun of a deadly kind.
On one of this week's interludes Nigella was shown shopping. Near Sloane Square tube station (nice!). She was searching for the ingredients for an evening meal at an expensive-looking Italian deli. Quick and easy it may have been to serve (bread, olives, salami and so on) but in my experience these are shops where one can spend, say, £30 and not have an awful lot to show for it. And then there's Nigella's kitchen. A cold, beautiful, manicured space for Nigella to prance around in and thrill middle-class, middle-aged viewers who think she's a bit saucy (geddit?). This isn't a family kitchen; it's a stage.
So as a kind of populist, rebranding exercise, Nigella Express miserably fails. But why use Lawson in this production in this way? Well, dumping her in a dingy flat in Hackney might have some kind of one-off, weird attraction, but a whole series? Draining Nigella of her class, her brand and her values would run up against a whole set of image and lifestyle aspirations. Okay, we don't all share Lawson's privileged life, but as a society we do share these values, often subconsciously.
On the other hand, some kind of 'look at me', aspirational ideology (the kind espoused by the likes of Nigella's dad in the 1980s) is going to be unpleasant and alienating viewing. Indeed, the jokes and cynicism surrounding Nigella's past television output and her posh class background (some of which has been elaborated by the media itself) suggest that this is her weak point.
Nigella Express is fuelled by a fear of the popular masses, a kind of submerged class struggle. One has to feel some minor sympathy for Nigella Lawson in this: she is pushed into an absurd role - reaching out to 'real' people with their busy lives - in which her television persona cannot properly function. At least we have been spared a version of the faux proletarian affectations espoused by Jamie Oliver and company.
But it could happen. Nigella could be making chip butties à la food-writer Nigel Slater (hopefully with white sliced bread and salad cream) before the year's out.