Known to Radio 4 staff as Lady Macbeth (thanks to her husky vocal delivery, courtesy of a 20-a-day habit and plenty of after-dinner Corona cigars), seen by some as a beacon of post-war female empowerment and others as a figure of fun, Fanny Cradock was many things – but dull certainly wasn’t one of them.
The daughter of a failed gambler, the flamboyant TV chef was our queen of cuisine for two decades from the mid 1950s, introducing impossibly exotic gourmet cooking to a nation still adjusting from the straitjacket of rationing. Married four times (twice bigamously), Cradock grew ever more eccentric as the years wore on, by the 1970s sporting ball gowns and tiaras on set, her face caked with make-up and eyebrows gradually inching up her forehead.
An effortlessly theatrical character, in short. Small wonder, then, that Bristol’s excellent Show of Strength theatre company have chosen to build their latest show around this flawed but fascinating woman. Fanny Johnnie Cook The Great American Songbook, to give it its full name, is a cabaret evening, performed in cafes and restaurants around Bristol this month, in which actors playing Fanny and her long-suffering husband Johnnie stir, sing, boil and bicker their way through an evening’s cooking, just as they did on their inimitable TV show all those years ago.
“I love writing about real people – and when it comes to the Cradocks, you simply don’t need to make anything up. It’s all there in front of you,” explains Sheila Hannon, SoS’s creative producer and Fanny and Johnnie’s creator. “Fanny wrote an autobiography which failed to mention, for example, the fact that she had married four times. So I started digging around on the internet and unearthed some fascinating and wonderful stuff. We may need to issue health warnings, as audiences will laugh so much they may choke.”
While researching the show, Sheila also discovered Fanny’s little-known ties to Bristol and Bath. “The grandfather who brought her up – Fanny seems to have been effectively abandoned by her own parents and went on to treat her own two sons in the same way – was born in Weston on the edge of Bath. The ancestral home, Apthorp, is still there… And, if that weren’t enough, her great-grandfather was an undertaker with premises in Bath and a shop on Park Street in Bristol – right opposite the Folk House where we’re doing the show!”
With well-known local actress and jazz singer Kate McNab playing Fanny and John Telfer – perhaps best known as The Archers’ resident vicar – as Johnnie, audiences are in for an uproarious evening, performed in cabaret style, with tables for dining and the Cradocks demonstrating the dishes they’re cooking up.
“John’s got far too much hair for Johnnie, but apart from that, he’s perfect,” Sheila smiles. “Kate’s well known as both a jazz singer and with her own company, Ministry of Entertainment. And they’re both great musicians. We all need a bit of cheering up right now – the recession seems to have affected the weather as well as everything else. Dinner with the Cradocks will be a great night out at a really affordable price.”
After a two-course dinner, it’ll be time to get the ouija board out. “I had to find a way to reveal Fanny’s dodgy past, which proved a bit of a problem as she was a terrible snob and would never have admitted she came from ‘trade’,” Sheila explains. “She and Johnnie were both firm believers in The Other Side (another little-known fact), so towards the end we have somebody rather unusual turning up to reveal the skeletons in the Cradock closet.”
Skeletons, snobbery and soufflés: wherever you sit, it all adds up to a most appetising evening.
Fanny Johnnie Cook The Great American Songbook is performed at various venues around Bristol from Friday, July 20, to Saturday, July 28. See listings for details.
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Article source: http://www.thisisbristol.co.uk/Serving-feast-fun-Fanny-Johnnie/story-16568738-detail/story.html