This Is Your Life: Keith Floyd

Keith FLOYD (1943-2009)

THIS IS YOUR LIFE - Keith Floyd, cook, restauranteur and television personality, was surprised by Michael Aspel in The Brazen Head pub in Dublin.

After a stint as a trainee reporter with the Bristol Evening Post, from which he was fired, Keith joined the Army, serving three years with the Royal Tank Regiment in Germany. He later found work in a sandwich bar in Bristol, which led to the opening of his first restaurant. By 1971 he was running three restaurants in Bristol, but having got into financial problems, he moved to the south of France, where he spent seven years learning the craft of cooking.

Returning to Bristol, Keith opened a new restaurant where he met a television producer who offered him work on regional television. This led, in 1984, to him being offered his first BBC television series Floyd on Fish. More cooking shows followed for the BBC, where he pioneered the idea of taking cookery programmes out of the studio, presenting shows from around the world and cooking on location in his unique chaotic style.

"Incredible! Michael Aspel - you are a bum!"

programme details...

Edition No: 812
Subject No: 802
Broadcast date: Wed 23 Oct 1991
Broadcast time: 7.00-7.30pm
Recorded: Tue 20 Aug 1991
Venue: Teddington Studios
Series: 32
Edition: 2
Code name: Soup

on the guest list...

Patrick - son
Poppy - daughter
Winnifred - mother
Shauna Mullett - fiancée
John Miles
David Pritchard
Lyn Ratzie
Ray Gravell
Roger Bennett
Jeremy Bryan
Robin Evans
Mark Benson
Joy Benson
Hugh Cornwell
Albert Roux
Pierre Connille
Albert Gassiaux
residents of L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue
Bill Wyman

production team...

Researcher: Elizabeth Ross
Writer: Roy Bottomley
Directors: Brian Klein, Terry Yarwood
Associate Producer: John Graham
Producer: Malcolm Morris

names above in bold indicate subjects of This Is Your Life

related pages...

The Spice of Life

serving up a feast

Behind the Scenes

the programme's best kept secrets

How We Kept The Secret

TV Times interviews recent subjects

Screenshots of Keith Floyd This Is Your Life

Keith Floyd recalls This Is Your Life in his autobiography, Out of the Frying Pan: Scenes From My Life...

At the time I was blissfully naïve about all of that, I was just drinking my coffee and sitting on the edge, enthralled by the way these people spoke, the books and the music they discussed.

In fact I was in such a trance, it was only when, something like thirty years later, to my amazement I was accosted in Dublin by Michael Aspel and kidnapped onto This Is Your Life that I discovered anything about these people. Before the guests come on to This Is Your Life you hear their voices and they say something which is designed to jog your memory of some past event. I heard this voice saying, 'Floydsie, you still owe me for a suit!' I sat there like a stoat under a snake, or vice versa. Who the fuck was that? Then I remembered. It was Jeremy Bryan, a brilliant reporter from the Bristol Evening Post, with whom one night I had set off to cover a fire or a plane crash or some disaster. In fact, it wasn't even that. We were all in the pub, the White Hart, and as far as we were concerned, work was over and we had probably had a few too many. The phone rang in the pub and the landlord called Jeremy over and said, 'You've had a phone call and you've got to go.' 'I want to come too!' I shouted. 'In fact, I'll take you there, because I've got a motor scooter.' Well, we crashed. Wrecked Jeremy's suit, never did get to the disaster, and spent the whole night in the Bristol Royal Infirmary, not seriously wounded in any way, just with scratches and bruises.

Another great This Is Your Life surprise that night involved a wonderful Evening Post journalist called Roger Bennett, who, a little bit like the Country Editor of the Western Daily Press, had always impressed upon me the importance of acknowledging people as you travel through life. Indeed many years after the time we are talking about now, Roger Bennett went on to become a very successful broadcaster at the BBC. Whenever I was in town he would always ring me up and ask me to go onto his programme and I always would. He said to me one day, 'There are some people we both know who are now very famous (much more famous than me) who don't have the time to come onto the programme.'

Scriptwriter Roy Bottomley recalls this edition of This Is Your Life in his book, This Is Your Life: The Story of Television's Famous Big Red Book...

Other researchers have followed the same pattern as Sue Green.

They, too, have been seeking the vital piece of information which will give us the best impact start to the programmes. The pick-up is all-important to the Life.

First information on broadcasting chef Keith Floyd is not what we wanted on our menu.

It seems he will not be at his Devon pub where we hoped to surprise him with Michael Aspel popping in for a pint. Instead, Keith will be in Dublin.

The wheels are set in motion for the pick-up team, with Michael, to be in Dublin on the same day, surprise Keith and fly him back to our studios here at Teddington. His codename is 'Soup', but it looked for a while as though we could be in it. We finally track him down in Dublin – to a pub, and Michael pops in for a pint.

Series 32 subjects