A toast to the original TV chefs

One of the originals: Julia Child. Picture: Jim Scherer courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics

Julia Child has had many children. Since her pioneering efforts in televising cooking in the US, foodie telly has been a recipe for success – now challenging crime as the most popular subject for TV shows. In Australia, SBS even has a channel dedicated to it, while commercial networks groan beneath the weight of shows such as MasterChef and My Kitchen Rules. TV made celebrities of our cooks and chefs, from Margaret Fulton to Kylie Kwong via Bernard King, Maggie Beer and Poh Ling Yeow. I played a role in launching the career of one of our first celebrity chefs, Peter Russell-Clarke – but that, as they say, is another story.

To begin at the beginning. Julia Child (1912-2004) claimed to have kicked off the phenomenon in 1963 at public broadcaster WGBH in Boston, where her show The French Chef quickly gained national fame. Currently being portrayed by Sarah Lancashire in the series Julia on Foxtel, she has previously been played by Jean Stapleton, Meryl Streep and, in drag, by John Candy and Dan Aykroyd.

However, Child was not the first. Julia was preceded by Jean – right here in Australia. Jean Bowring had a cooking show on the Seven Network in Melbourne from 1957 to 1960. I know because it was my very first job in television, the local industry then just one year old. Screens were tiny, and the images fuzzily black-and-white; telly was such a novelty that people still watched it through shop windows. The only non-American or non-British show on the ABC or commercial channels was the news bulletin, largely read out from the daily papers. Seven did have a show called The Hit Parade where a few local singers mimed to American records.

Paid just five quid a week and dossing in a single room a few miles away, I depended on the leftovers from The Jean Bowring Show to augment my meagre diet. At the end of shooting each half-hour program (previously just 15 minutes) there’d be a race between us – me, the camera crew, the floor manager and the boom swinger – for the crumbs from Jean’s table.

In those pre-digital days, the tricks of the trade were primitive. Filmmakers filled ice-cream cones with mashed potato for their actors to lick – because the real thing quickly melted under the lights. And when filming a dance in the rain it was common to add milk to the mixture to make the downpour more visible. We should have remembered such legerdemain on the famous occasion of Jean Bowring’s multi-layer sponge cake.

As Julia Child would learn, it was essential for a TV chef to pre-cook the food for the grand finale. Julia, like Jean before her, would take viewers through the recipe and then, with a flourish, unveil the triumphant result. On that day in Seven’s little studio in Dorcas Street, South Melbourne, Jean demonstrated how to make a chocolate sponge. Like little children, the crew and I longed to lick the utensils but had to wait…

Finally, the credits rolled and we prepared to break the four-minute mile. In prime position to get there first (and before Mrs B could shout a warning), I grabbed my gobful of the pre-prepared cake. No plate, no fork, no niceties. We all got stuck into it.

Only to discover, too late, that the cream wasn’t cream. It was the popular men’s hair styling product of the era, Brylcreem.

To this day, 60 years later, I can still taste the foul muck.