OK, he's cheesy and the colours are very early-Seventies. But it seems to me that Graham Kerr is rarely given the place he deserves in histories of television cooking.
Because he made it fun and he made it aspirational. Before Kerr, you'd watch the terrifying Fanny Craddock showing you how to prepare a dinner party for your husband's boss and his wife (with the unspoken implication that your husband might lose his job if you didn't get it right.)
Kerr, by contrast, would show you film of an overseas restaurant he and his wife had visited, tell you what they ate there and then cook it for you himself. This was television for the first generation to take their holidays abroad and his show, The Galloping Gourmet, was hugely popular in Britain.
The restaurant in the video here is in Sussex, but as the Galloping Gourmet was made in Canada, that was overseas to the show.
And Kerr cooked with wine, cracked jokes, drank wine during the show (or at least pretended too) and laughed if things went wrong. Here he even cooks with oysters and lobster - imagine how luxurious that seemed in a show made between 1968 and 1972.
One part of Kerr's usual method is missing here: he usually pulled someone out of the audience (usually a woman) to enjoy the dish he had just cooked with him.
I'm sure Keith Floyd watched Kerr, and I've heard Rick Stein say that he worked on one of the shows Kerr made in Australia or New Zealand before The Galloping Gourmet made him famous around the world.
Kerr, who was born in England and didn't move to New Zealand until his mid twenties, is still with us at the age of 91.
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