Easy riders

Steve Pratt speaks to TV chefs Simon King and Dave Myers.

BEING both hairy and bikers, they more than fit their name the Hairy Bikers. But Simon King and Dave Myers have shown that they’re much more than a gimmicky attempt to find the male answer to Two Fat Ladies.

They’ve established themselves as both cooks and travellers of note who serve up big audiences on BBC2. As King points out, they were the top-rated show on BBC2 one week with 4.2m viewers.

The trust that the Beeb puts in them to attract good ratings is demonstrated in making them strippers – they’re in the process of filming 30 programmes about the culinary delights of each British county that will be stripped across the weekday schedules in the teatime slot next year.

When we speak, the pair are also facing an interrogation from their audience. What, one woman demands, is the worst thing they’ve eaten.

“Goat’s penis,” says King, or it might have been Myers. Faced with two big men and a lot of facial hair, it sometimes throws you into a “which one is Ant and which one is Dec?” dilemma.

They both answer questions, sometimes together, making it a nightmare for interrogators.

The goat’s penis was on the menu in Vietnam during their first BBC2 series for which they got on their bikes and tasted cuisine from around the world. Their latest trip has brought them to Northumbria. They’re special guests at the official opening dinner at an eco-friendly café at Azure Garden Centre where chef Malcolm Brown had selected dishes from The Hairy Bikers’ Cookbook for the menu.

Café Azure is the brainchild of Azure Charitable Enterprises, a charity that employs and trains disabled people across the North-East.

Some jobs have already been created in the café, off Station Road, Cramlington.

The bikers are having a busy celebrity time, switching on the Christmas lights in Newcastle (Myers’ home town) and Barrow-in-Furness (King’s home town) on consecutive nights.

Then there’s a Hairy Bikers’ Christmas Special next week on BBC2, the same channel that has ordered a marathon series of 45-minute shows from the pair to screen in the 5.15-6pm slot every weekday for six weeks. These need to be delivered by May, which is why the pair are busy biking around the country, from Land’s End to John O’Groats, discovering each county’s traditional food and recipes. With North Yorkshire, Oxfordshire, Hampshire and Shropshire under their belts, they’ll continue on their travels next year.

I don’t want to sound condescending, but they really do have the common touch. They seem genuinely interested in not only what they do but what people think of what they do. And they’ve achieved it without an overuse of the fword or campaigning for better school dinners like some other TV chefs I could name.

They’ve been together as the Hairy Bikers for nearly five years, although first met some 17 years ago on the North-East set of the Catherine Cookson TV drama The Gambling Man which starred Robson Green. Myers was working as a make-up and prosthetics man, and King was a first assistant director and location manager.

They discovered they both enjoyed the same things – bikes and food. At that point it was, as Myers says “a lifestyle that cost us money”. Now they get paid for being easy riders on the TV cooking circuit.

A bike could have ended their friendship before it began. They first got to know each other when Myers tried to return the bike he’d been sold by King. Despite their interest in food and bikes, their work in the film and TV industry kept getting in the way of pursuing those activities.

In the end, they took the plunge and made a pilot TV show which so impressed the BBC that a series of The Hairy Bikers was commissioned.

“We wanted to do our own programme. It’s cooking, chatting to people and writing books.

Like brothers, we never run out of anything to say,” says Myers.

They’d been in the industry long enough to be aware that it’s performance driven. If you get an audience, you’ll get a re-commission. “We struck a chord because we try to make the food as accessible as possible. People can have a crack at it and it’s about being entertained,” explains King.

“Neither Dave nor I want to teach anybody how to do Michelin star food because that’s not us. To do that, to achieve that, you have to give your life over to food.”

They still get a buzz and appreciation out of their food adventures, and that enthusiasm carries over to their audience. “It’s like being with your best mates for half an hour. It takes you out of yourself and you learn a lot,” says King.

COOKING has always been part of their lives. King remembers his mum and dad’s home cooking. Myers first discovered food as an adolescent when he went to London to university, although talks of “three years on tinned meat, Smash and peas”. While doing a fine arts degree at Goldsmith College, he discovered the Asian markets in Peckham where he was living. He remembers going to his first Indian restaurant and thinking how great it was.

Their ease in front of the camera isn’t the result of practice, it just happens. “We go with the flow. It just becomes obvious what to say and do,” says King. “We have a shorthand as we’ve been together such a long time. We know how it operates and just do it. We work hard and play hard, but it’s fantastic fun.”

They don’t see that their Northern background has had any effect on what they do and how people perceive them. “We’re not parochial people. We never made a programme in Britain until last year. We didn’t want to become professional Northerners. It wasn’t appropriate,”

says Myers.

King elaborates on that point. “Now we have a wealth of experience through travelling. And it’s great because travel, by nature of the way we do it, broadens your horizons so much that it doesn’t matter where you come from.”

■ The Hairy Bikers Christmas Special: Thursday, BBC2, 8pm.