Peter Russell-Clarke was a legend. But they don’t make them like they used to

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Kids today will never know the struggle. Once upon a time, we didn’t know what a jus was. We were ignorant of the need for delicate and artistic plating skills, and of the meaning of the term mise en place. No one had ever taken a “food journey”; it had never occurred to anyone that they needed one. And a croquembouche? Mind your language.

The death on the weekend of Peter Russell-Clarke, one of Australia’s original celebrity chefs, is a reminder that once upon a time television cooks and television cookery were simultaneously much simpler yet way more eccentric than the slick modern incarnations of the TV kitchen.

Forty years from now, obituaries for our 21st century TV tong-wranglers will simply not be able to compete with lines like this, from our tribute to Russell-Clarke over the weekend: “To reduce his life to a catch cry would be like calling Michelangelo a ceiling painter. Russell-Clarke was nothing less than a renaissance man with an Australian accent and a foul mouth.”

With no disrespect to Russell-Clarke’s modern heirs, the obit writers of the future will not be facing such challenges of description.

It was a different time, those years of our transition from the land of meat-and-three-veg to … whatever modern, migrant Australia was going to be, and our guides on the idiot box were a varied crew. To confirm just how different it was, hark back to the late 1950s when Australian television was home to programs such as A Woman’s World, a daily ABC offering that began in the same year as television and was aimed squarely at housewives, which in 1956 is what most wives still were.

On to these airwaves in the early 1960s wafted one Bernard King, if a word as gentle as waft can be used to describe the effect of Bernard King appearing on your TV set.

King was, in the terminology of the time, flamboyant – as camp as a bombe alaska set on fire with a flamethrower held by Liberace. And when it came to “food journeys”, they didn’t come much more glamorous than King’s rise to fame.

The story goes that King, to that point an entertainer rather than a chef, hosted a dinner party at his little Brisbane flat for none other than Vivien Leigh, then touring Australia doing Shakespeare. The host of A Woman’s World was at that dinner, and was so taken with King’s flair that she invited him on the show.

A kitchen star was born, and it all began with dinner for Scarlett O’Hara.

He became a television institution by the 1970s and ’80s: ask your Gen X friends and it will be a toss-up whether they remember him cooking and camping it up with Don Lane or delivering the most brutal put-downs as a judge on TV talent quests such as New Faces and Pot of Gold. He wouldn’t be let near the gentle hug-it-out confines of MasterChef Australia without therapists and lawyers.

Russell-Clarke entered the national consciousness in the 1980s as a kind of anti-Bernard King. Whereas King was all sashay and suave scarves, Russell-Clarke was like the word “g’day” in human form. He was as dinky-di as King was impossibly arch.

As with King, there was much more to him than met the eye. He was an artist more than he was a chef, before his TV program Come And Get It and his ubiquity as a TV pitch man made him the kitchen voice of a generation. MasterChef and My Kitchen Rules wouldn’t have known what to do with him.

Healthy, Wealthy and Wise’s resident chef Iain “Hewey” Hewitson.

Plenty of other famous men have influenced our kitchen lives over the years. The ’90s brought us Iain “Huey” Hewitson on Ten’s Healthy, Wealthy and Wise, Geoff Jansz on Nine’s What’s Cooking? and Burke’s Backyard. Millennials, and anyone else who spent afternoons at home in the noughties, will remember the comforting distractions of Ready Steady Cook.

But it is often the women we embrace as we look back on our kitchen comfort era, before it all became terribly serious and ambitious and competitive.

There is the godmother of Australian cooking herself, Margaret Fulton, who parlayed her home economics background into a stature perhaps unmatched in the annals of Australian food. She summons memories of cookbooks and TV segments and commercials and magazine columns, but she was much more than that. She was, in a tradition still embodied by the great Maggie Beer, like a warm hug in a cosy kitchen.

She remains an invisible presence in millions of kitchens, even those occupied by people too young to remember her. Somewhere along the line you have absorbed a cooking lesson from someone who absorbed it from Margaret.

Cook Dorinda Hafner was a daytime TV favourite.

In the ’90s, our horizons broadened through the unlikely vehicle of Bert Newton, whose reincarnation as a morning variety show host/infomercial huckster on Ten’s Good Morning Australia delivered new kitchen celebrities: the irrepressible Elizabeth Chong, born in China, and Dorinda Hafner, born in Ghana, who became household names alongside TV’s greatest showman.

Their national celebrity suggested TV cooking was growing up, even as it retained its traditional unfussy and occasionally off-the-rails flair. With Bert at the helm, there was always time for cracking wise as you cracked eggs. It seemed Australia always preferred its TV cookery served with a decent side of corn.

Everything changed in 2009.

There is TV food BM and AM (Before and After MasterChef) and the elevation of food critics and five-star chefs as our arbiters of skill and taste changed the way we think about food on the telly, and indeed the way we think about food in general. We have gained much from it, but also perhaps lost a little along the way: our kitchen comedians, our jokesters and eccentrics wielding one-liners as deftly as they wielded whisks.

As Peter-Russell Clarke was famous for asking in another context: Where’s the cheese?

Do you have a favourite memory of a TV chef? We would love to hear about it in the comments below.

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