Andi Oliver despairs on the lack of deep cultural data in some of the youthful folks she meets right now. “I was talking to a woman of about 30 the other day who didn’t know who Judy Garland was,” she says. “I said, you know: Wizard of Oz? She looked at me blankly and I started singing all these songs of hers and she said, ‘Oh! That lady from that film!’”
The 63-year-old punk singer turned TV chef shakes her head in bewilderment. “Imagine living in a world where Judy f**king Garland is just ‘the lady from that film’. For me she’s a beacon of passion and heartbreak and artistic poetic beauty and power.” Oliver admires the late icon’s “survivor’s grit”.
“She was a little kid, and they [Hollywood execs] treated her like hell, putting all those drugs in her body and strapping down her boobs, and she still sang like an angel. I love her!”
Get Oliver on a roll about Golden Age Hollywood and also you’re in for a trip. She swoons over childhood reminiscences of the Saturday afternoon TV films that gave her a “broad cinematic knowledge” as a toddler. “I adored Bette Davis in everything,” she says. “Tony Curtis in Some Like it Hot. Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird – watching that film was a huge moment in my life. It was the film that really got me thinking about big ideas of right and wrong, about what was just and fair…”
She was impressed by Peck’s “performance for the ages as Atticus Finch, and I yearned for the relationship that character had with his daughter, Scout [after whom Oliver named her dog] because I had a pretty crap relationship with my father. He would come home when I was halfway through watching Sunset Boulevard and change channels to watch the f**king wrestling.”
We’re on the subject as a result of the theme of this yr’s Great British Menu – which Oliver has offered with vigorous authority since 2020 after serving as a choose for 4 seasons – is films. It was filmed in Liverpool, which Oliver tells me is the second most filmed metropolis within the UK. “As a port city it reflects so many different cultures – such beautiful, diverse, dramatic architecture. No wonder they used it for Gotham in The Batman [2022], with Robert Pattinson standing on top of the Royal Liver Building…”
A fast google proves her proper. More than 1,600 movie and TV productions (together with the BBC’s This City is Ours and Netflix’s House of Guinness) have been shot there, creating greater than 5,000 jobs previously six years.
The Great British Menu was filmed in St George’s Hall [Gotham City Hall in The Batman] the place Oliver says the rival cooks “got really nostalgic with the dishes they made, harking back to the films that lit them up as children. One guy picked a Bond film. Not for the macho themes, but because of his memories of watching it as a boy with his mum, dad and siblings. I found that really moving.”
Chatting by way of Zoom from her cosy London residence – an eclectic rainbow-jumble of books, fairy lights and postcards on the cabinets behind her – Oliver is an emphatic fanatic. A passionate, knowledgeable advocate for all types of tradition – “books, films, music and food fed my soul!” – she has little time for the much less thought of components of “a narcissistic culture” which doesn’t worth the artwork types which “push us to understand ourselves and develop empathy for others”.
Born in Paddington in 1963, Oliver is the kid of Antiguan mother and father. Her “incredible” mom labored as a main faculty trainer whereas her father served within the RAF and was primarily based at RAF Honington which meant Oliver was raised in Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk from the age of 10. She tells me she skilled “overt racism at school” however treasures reminiscences of library visits together with her mom, who inspired her to devour books of all types and relish “the romance of literature, the crinkle of the thin pages of an encyclopaedia”.
Can she describe why her relationship together with her dad was so dangerous? “My therapist thinks he was bipolar,” she says. “I never really understood that, back then. But he was either all like roses and teddy bears and loads of presents, or he was all dark, oppressive energy. He wouldn’t talk at all for days or he would tell me I was a whore.”
Oliver says that her father’s misogyny meant that he doted on his little daughter till she went by way of puberty. “He turned on me when I grew boobs. He became this terrible person, using really destructive, traumatising language about me. It’s taken a long time for me to fix the parts of me that he broke.” She suspects that the “hypervigilance I learned around him is what makes me a good presenter, because I know what’s happening in every corner of a room and I can make sure it all lands without a crisis. I believe that everything we survive can become a tool for good.”
Her Uncle John was a extra admirable male affect on her life. “John Prince was one of the first black headmasters in this country,” she says. “He’s 97now and remains an exceptional man. He has something of the Atticus Finch about him and a bit of Sidney Poitier: elegant and erudite.” I think about he endured some terrible racist opposition to his appointment? “Yes, masses of it,” she nods. “He dealt with it in the most incredible way.”
She tells me that when she walks with him by way of Ridley Road Market in east London right now “these great burly men will come rushing up shouting, ‘Mr Prince! Mr Prince!’ They bring their grandchildren over to see the man who guided so many young people to light in their life, helped them to make good choices.”
Oliver was relieved when her mother and father cut up up when she was 16 and she or he was capable of transfer again to London together with her mum. “People always talk about divorce as though, obviously, it’s awful. But I was pleased when my dad left. Nobody wants to listen to the shouting. It’s embarrassing if your mates come around and your parents are having a barney.”
Through all of it, meals was “another avenue of escape” for her. “My mum taught me to cook when I was really young and I later discovered that was because she hated being in the kitchen,” she laughs. “But she saw it was another outlet for my creativity and I really enjoyed it. By the time I was 10 I could make a roast dinner. I discovered I could nourish people, that food created a transformative moment, not just in the belly but in the heart.”
Her associate in crime in her late teenagers was future pop star Neneh Cherry, with whom she continues to be finest associates. The pair met when Cherry was singing in punk band Rip Rig + Panic, of which Oliver’s brother Sean (who died of sickle cell anaemia in 1990, aged simply 27) was a member. Oliver would additionally sing within the band.
Cherry has beforehand recalled their assembly (when she was 17 and Oliver was 16) as “love at first sight. Within minutes we were smoking fags and planning to make a record together.” Oliver says: “We were both burning separately and when we came together there was an ignition – and explosion.”
She chuckles. “We were a funny pair of teenagers. We were cooking for people all the time. I remember once we had this party and we had like a bath half full of mackerel we were sousing.” The pair additionally famously used to boil whiskey, assuming they have been making the spirit extra alcoholic whereas they have been truly simmering away all of the alcohol.
“As young black women we had both experienced the feeling that the world had no space for us,” recollects Oliver. “We used to tuck our skirts into our knickers and simply dance. But I can bear in mind a well known music journalist asking, ‘What were you trying to tell us, when you shook your asses like that?’ I stated, ‘Not what you think we’re making an attempt to let you know!’ Because it was about empowerment. It wasn’t a sexual overture. It was our means of saying, ‘Here we f**king are. This is the size of my arse!’
“Do you know, when Neneh became massive the designers used to refer to her bum as her ‘African problem’. They were always asking, ‘What can we do about it?’”
Cherry’s three youngsters (together with pop star Mabel, 30) grew up with Oliver’s presenter/podcaster daughter Miquita, 41, and singer-songwriter Lily Allen, 41 – the daughter of Oliver’s pal, movie producer Alison Owen. As a single mom to Miquita (whose father is Scottish artwork historian Robin Baillie) Oliver got here to imagine that there’s “an iron bond created by single parents”. She says she has all the time shared an “unstoppable, unbreakable” connection together with her daughter “even when she was a horrible teenager”.
She met her present associate, Garfield Hackett, when Miquita was 10 and he’s puttering round within the background as we chat. There have been benefits to solo parenting, she argues. “There was nobody saying, Why isn’t the baby in bed? Why are you doing things this way?’ I saw a lot of my friends having to navigate that shit when their children were small.”
Today Oliver is “incredibly proud” of Miquita, and the hit podcast her daughter makes with Allen: Miss Me. She lately attended a sold-out reside recording of the podcast at Hackney Empire and was “bowled over to see the place packed to the rafters with people weeping and laughing”. She says folks have been responding to the duo’s “soul baring bravery” and “spiritual honesty”.
“There are a lot of facsimiles of real friendships in the media,” she says, “but those two have known each other their whole lives and you can’t manufacture that relationship.”
She’s additionally been thrilled by the success of Allen’s newest album, West End Girl, on which she spills the gory particulars of her open marriage to Stranger Things star David Harbour. “Lily is one of the cleverest people I know. So quick but she’s incredibly vulnerable.” Oliver believes the mix of these qualities have been what made Allen’s debut album “such a huge cultural moment that changed the way people were listening to music”.
But she is indignant on the relentless assaults on Allen by the right-wing press. “People forget that she’s a real tender-hearted soul. She’s really been through an awful lot with her divorce. It was really hard to see her go through so much pain and then, you know, and then all the papers always go for her in such a horrible, vicious way. It makes me sick.”
Oliver has been within the tabloids herself lately for talking out about how Mounjaro helped her shed some the cussed weight she “holds in the middle of my body”. She says, sighing: “People have all sorts of judgement about that. I lost three stone the regular way and then went on the Mounjaro and lost two more. Then I stopped taking it. But it really helped.”
She notices that “the people who criticise me for using it weren’t worried about my health when I was five stone overweight, were they? So why are they talking about it now? It’s because they’ve got some weird ethical judgment and I suspect that most of the people who make that ethical judgment have never struggled with weight loss.”
Your subsequent learn
She laughs. “I compare the weight-loss jab judgers to the men telling women what to do with their wombs. If you don’t have a womb, you don’t get to have an opinion. Just f**k off, mate. Don’t tell women what to do. Don’t tell black people what to do!”
Oliver lately took recommendation on this rating from Barack Obama, whom she met final yr. “He spoke about how we all have the capacity for light and dark in ourselves. He said that at the moment people are stepping towards the dark. We can feel that happening all over the world, but you can feel the backlash towards it happening. Look at the extraordinary people pushing back in Minneapolis right now,” she provides, referring to the protests towards Donald Trump’s immigration enforcers ICE.
She smiles, eyes glowing. “So each day I really remind myself to be kind, remind myself to step towards the light, towards my better instincts.” Food helps with this? “Oh yes! Food can be a gateway to hope! The Great British Menu is an overture to fellowship!”
The Great British Menu begins tonight at 7pm on BBC Two
