Peter Russell-Clarke

The interesting thing about art to me, and painting, is you use the same thinking with painting. You're mucking around with colour, form, texture, shape. And with cooking, you're doing the same thing. You mucking around with form, texture, colour, and shape. I started writing for television, when television started because I'm 87, and so I was here when television started, and I wrote stuff. And I noticed that the bloke in front of the camera got more money than the poor bugger that write the scripts. And so I decided to go from behind the camera to the front of the camera, and I then realised that there were too many policemen on television, and all sorts of other people that seemed to know what they were doing, but there were no cooks, and a cook is what I am. I started cooking on television, and the ABC said, "No one will be interested." We did 900 shows before the ABC got bored, and they took it off, but the public weren't bored. I was always interested in not telling the viewer how to make toffee to cover a fish. What I wanted them to do is understand how to cook the bloody fish to start because cooking is only supplying heat to food. If you don't supply heat, it's not cooked, the same as painting. Painting is supplying paint to a surface, whether it's a canvas or a piece of cardboard. For instance, I paint my own shoes. I buy the cheapest shoes I can get from whoever they are, a commercial mob. And then I come home and I paint them, and I just put colour on them, so people think that I've either gone out in my slippers, or else I've got expensive shoes. The thing is, use whatever paints you like. Use whatever colour you like, and make sure that you are pleased with what you do. Don't worry about any... Imagine if we said to Picasso, "You've painted three eyes down the side of the face, "you silly bugger, that's wrong. "You should only paint one eye, "or if you're painting the face full on two eyes." Do what you want to do. Do what you think is right, and then you'll create your own style and your own imagination. Because cooking is not following a recipe book. Cooking is your imagination, and painting is your imagination. So make sure you think about what you're doing. So when you're designing your food or your painting, make sure that you understand absolutely what you're doing. Do it to suit you, and not some bloody book that tells you how to do it. There we go. Jan and I have been married 65 years, I think, which is a bloody long while. Jan works as my assistant. And when we were filming to the ABC, Jan would be down one end of the bench cooking three of everything, in case I buggered it up, or dropped it on the floor, she'd have spares. So we've worked together all our lives. Jan came out from England, she'd been the secretary to the first, Dag Hammarskjöld, the first Secretary of the United Nations, and she was in there, a hostess, and she's done all sorts of things, and then she met me, and she's had a pretty boring life ever since. Anyway, we met, got married, and I must admit, I couldn't want for a better assistant. Well, do you, have I said everything.?

Yes, I think so.

Bored the shit out of everyone for long enough, you reckon?