Great Food Live

8.40pm on Good Friday. I have so many bunches of flowers I feel I am present at my own funeral.

The truth is we pre-recorded today’s show, and now I realise why.

After five and a half years, 5,942 recipes, a stable of exhaustingly generous chefs and a team of undyingly committed GoodFoodLifers, it would’ve been impossible to do it live.

The tears started on Wednesday when I recieved a bottle of Champagne and a card written by our Polish caff-ertiers. When they first started serving up breakfast not one of them had a word of English. Now they can argue with you, in perfect Blighty, about how much you owe on your tab. I cried as one immigrant to another.

When the wreaths started arriving, I was minus mascara. After make-up, fully painted, lashes as long as you like, and yet more flowers, I was still minus makeup. Poor old Carolyte had to be on hand with her makeup bag and a few well chosen shovels and trowels to reapply the camouflage – the old face needed re-landscaping every few minutes.

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I have over one hundred cookery books in the flat, and even more at home in the cottage, so when the Hairy Bikers Cookbook arrived on my desk, I was less than overjoyed at yet another tome I had to absorb. After the shows I have so much to do. I do think I am some sort of workaholic, which is why the programme coming off is a little scary. All that time to think about myself. Oooooee terrifying.

But whatever I do, I have my bedtime ritual which is always the same. Sometimes I brush my teeth, depending on whether Jim is around for a good night smacker, remove all my makeup, remove my pyjamas, put on my reading glasses, plump up the pillows slide into bed and read my notes and whatever book we are doing. So, apart from my teeth, it’s pretty much routine. But let me just tell you the routine of keeping myself televisual which is a pain in the proverbial.

I have a wonderful beautician, Amanda Day, who has her Chilstern Clinic in Tunbridge Wells. Every month I lie down on her chair/bed, she covers me in a blanket and then proceeds to hurt me. With enzymes, and potions, she sets about dealing with my ancient skin. Considering I have 83,000 tons of crap ladled on my face daily, Amanda does a very good job in keeping my derm and paciderm elastic. The ceiling fan whizzes round like a Moroccan bazaar – the cold air is theoretically meant to reduce the stinging. Yeah, and pigs might fly. New age music – a loose term – is played through the tasteful speaker, and then I lie very still until the stuff on my face dries – hard, and pinchy. If I move an eyebrow, it can make my face itch, so I remain comotose. The slightest twitch can destroy the calm. Sometimes Amanda administers reflexology on my feet, which does wonders for my soul and heels. By the time the concrete has been washed off, I am so relaxed that the car drives itself home.

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Well, it’s 1.01, or too-late-for-my-own-good.

The old man has just arrived home from Hornchuch where he’s been giving his Trinculo in the Tempest. I watched some TV after driving for two and a half hours from the centre of London, where I did a voiceover for an advert that I WANT. Sorry, I don’t mean to shout but we jobbing actresses have to take whatever we can get.

I didn’t know that Jane Asher, she of no middle name, started acting when she was five. She is of indeterminate age, a step grandmother, with a sylph-like body and a fab sense of humour. She made cakes on the show and all the time I wanted to ask her what she thought about Heather Mills, or as she was so aptly described in the paper recently as ‘that one legged charity campaigner’, but Ms Asher has class and discretion and she would never reveal what she really felt about anybody, and certainly not an act like Mrs Mills.

Longevity in the business does equate with how many people you have miffed. June Whitfield is renowned for being a lovely woman. My mentor Betty Marsden, of the same generation as Miss Whitfield, and the female voice in ‘Round the Horne’, pee’d off everybody she met. If she didn’t like them, she told the truth. She taught me to do that in both my acting and writing.

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One of the best things about getting older is that you really do know what you are doing.

In today’s ‘wrinkle free, let’s pretend we haven’t lived for years in case we look a day older than 28’ culture we actually deny all experience. We’re turning into denuded rats without a grain of pain on our smooth uplifted faces.

I admit that I am one of the lucky ones. I don’t have many lines although I do have the down turned mouth which afflicts so many of us old peasant women. It makes me look sullen and miserable even if I am hysterical on the inside.

If I catch myself in the window of ‘Top Shop’, I grin – yes, inanely – or if I feel the scowl, I try and smile, even if it is only passing bus drivers who notice. Indeed, I do get that inner glow when the sewage truck comes to empty the cess-pit in the garden. I know the geezer with the pipe (his son used to learn cello with my daughter) so we always have a chat as he empties last month’s waste. He says I don’t look a day older. The reason I mention this is because today’s programme bore testimony to the good old, and I mean that – the GOOD OLD.

We had Jimmy Hill (Oh, behave!) on the show (he of the footballing pedigree) with his delightful wife Bryony. She talked about her gardening book, her painting, jam making, her breasts and her husband’s long career. It was quite a chinwag, which is exactly what she was. Probably one of the first ever WAGS there was, if ever the WAGS there is. But the point is that we all chatted so easily because we are old.

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Thank you for the kind comments. So many and too many to answer individually, but be rest assured they are noted and gratefully received.

We had a little hangover cushion on today’s show. Stuffed with herbs in brown silk, it smelt intoxicating, and was hand-crafted in Nepal. You can buy them from Wild Earth. They’re sweet and buying them gives decent people some pennies.

I brought four back to the flat: one for hangovers, which is great for today; a yellow one for dreams; a pink one for energy; and a deep crimson one for passon. I think I may leave the passionate red one in the airing cupboard just in case. All the herb combinations are different but they all assault the nostrils magnificently.

Uncle Leo, the floor manager, is in Dubai doing some kind of horse racing (floor managing it, not entering the fray) but he says he will be back for the last week, we have 7 shows to go. I am managing to get through them. I’m not sure how, although pulsatilla, a homeopathic remedy, helps.

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