Very juicy, but for torn tail

Press, 22 May 1978, Page 15

Very juicy, but for torn tail

By

JOHN COLLINS

Hudson and Halls seem to be trying for a tougher image with their new series: It is still mainly about cooking and double entendre, but it now includes a sort of ‘■Country Calendar” look at how and where our food is grown or caught, in place of those astounding non-inter-views where the hosts and their guests would stare disconsolately into their glasses of vin rose and try to come up with a question. Very brisk, indeed, all that striding about in smelly crayfish boats, banter with the boys in the packing shed, and risking wrinkles in the hot sun of Gisborne’s avocado fields. But it was light and amusing enough, though Hudson’s squeals of revulsion were echoed by my own when the camera zoomed in as tails were whipped off crayfish that

seemed to be taking an unusual interest in current affairs for things that were supposed to have passed on. It may strictly be true that the crayfish are dead,

clinically speaking, when the tails are pulled off, and that the unsightly twitching and jiggling about is a post-mor-tem reaction. But it would seem good manners, if nothing else, to wait until the creatures lie still in their final repose before ripping them up and rushing the best bits off to America. Hudson seemed most impressed with the overseas earnings; he seemed to have boned up on the tally — $23.7M — before the show, and to be determined to pop in his bit of statistics at

every opportunity. How regrettable that our native creatures should be shredded in such an undignified manner, all for the sake of the Yankee dollar. Perhaps a

monument to the Unknown Crayfish would not be out of place. The image of the poor, wriggling creatures stayed with me all through the second half of the programme, the cooking itself (though whether this was caused by conscience, or by the poor reception in my part of town, I’m not sure). But Hudson and Halls’s cooking overcame conscience in the end, and the programme concluded with me ready to wander the streets in my saliva-stained bib fully

prepared to tear the delicious tail off any crayfish I might encounter, alive or dead.

Nevertheless, there is a great difference between killing what one is to eat and cooking it (though not all that much difference when I am the cook), and it is to be hoped that Hudson and Halls will not start their next programme by publicly eviscerating a cow with a blunt razor before showing us how to cook hamburgers. Assassination of prospective foods apart, Hudson and Halls are the most interesting cooks on television, by far. Alison Holst always seems to devote half an hour to cooking one sausage with a dollop of tomato sauce and worry all the while about the cost of living. Des Britten wobbles and simpers away too much, as if his headmaster was just behind the camera.

Hudson and Halls just wanter around in a tizz — a sort of cross between Laurel and Hardy and Danny La Rue — and most of the interest is in whether they will actually manage to cook anything, or whether Hudson will finally give in to the worry that seems to dog him, decide that it’s really all just too much, and leave Halls, grinning with puzzlement, to clean up.