Food for thought in more ways than one

I WAS expecting more in the way of revelations than Secrets Of The Royal Kitchen served up. Instead of what the butler-saw-type secrets, we got recipes from former royal chef Graham Newbold. The only saucy secrets concerned the liquid poured on the meat.

Those who love statistics would have been ecstatic to learn of the 1,500 canapes prepared by 20 chefs for a drinks reception. These nibbles took three days to make and just two hours to be consumed by guests. We also learnt that the Queen sometimes eats her dinner off a card table in front of the telly, information designed to show that, deep down, she's just like the rest of us.

But she is a fussy eater, politely declining one of the 400 suckling pigs slaughtered for the occasion on a visit to Tonga. Apparently, the Pope was miffed when the Queen, who's very English in her tastes, let it be known she wouldn't eat pasta, tomato sauce and garlic.

And, like a first-time-abroad tourist, doesn't trust the foreign water and takes her own bottled variety wherever she goes in the world.

Another fact revealed that 50 butlers tend the table when she has 140 people round to the palace for dinner, which provides a neat link to the documentary about writer and lyrist P G Wodehouse, best known for creating Bertie Wooster and his manservant Jeeves.

This programme did have secrets to impart as it dealt with Wodehouse's apparent betrayal of his country during the Second World War, a fall from grace that led to friends disowning him, libraries burning his books and exile from his homeland for the rest of his life.

He and his wife Ethel tried to escape from France, where they were living, when the Germans invaded. They failed, with Wodehouse being sent to a series of internment camps. For reasons never fully explained, he agreed to broadcast to his American fans - the US was not yet in the war - and went off to Berlin, where he recorded five talks over a two-month period. The Germans eventually decided to broadcast them to the British too.

Wodehouse found himself a tool of propaganda, both at home and abroad. Fellow prisoner Barrie Pitt said it was absurd to call him a traitor. He'd been foolish but not betrayed his country. Several government inquiries reached the same conclusion - that he'd been an innocent abroad. Unfortunately, the documents absolving him remained official secrets until 1999.

Peter Cook also had his faults, including womanising and drinking himself into oblivion in the latter part of his life, but he was also "great fun, naughty, wicked" in the words of one friend. This warts-and-all TV biography also reminded us that he was capable of being very funny indeed. Once he took off on one of his comic flights of fancy, there was no stopping him.

His first wife, Wendy, and friends recalled his life with honesty not just gushing adolation, interspersed with generous clips from his TV and stage work. Most intriguing was his relationship with Dudley Moore, the other half of a successful partnership that seemed to have a love-hate dimension that added edge to their work.

Like many comedians, Cook was a troubled man. Before it was fashionable, he was seeing a psychiatrist because, he said, "I have been doing funny voices for so long I no longer know who I am".