Forget Mung Beans and Quinoa, if you want to eat well, get one of Nigella Lawson’s cookbooks. At fifty-seven she looks sensational and her career, on the small screen and in print, goes from strength to strength. Men and women adore her in equal measure. Gorgeous, brainy, AND a fantastic cook, what’s not to like?
Nigella is the daughter of former Chancellor of the Exchequer Nigel Lawson, and Vanessa, part of the fabulously wealthy Lyons food and catering family. It was no surprise that after graduating from Oxford Nigella started work in the food industry, as a book reviewer and restaurant critic. She eventually became literary editor of The Sunday Times.
Her first cookery book, “How to Eat”, published in 1998, sold a massive 300,000 copies and made her a household name. She followed that with “How to be a Domestic Goddess”, which firmly established her as one of the country’s most popular cookery authors.
TV seemed the natural progression and “Nigella Bites” aired on Channel 4, with an accompanying book. Viewers on both sides of the Atlantic were enthralled by her intimate presenting style. The New York Times said “Lawson’s sexy roundness makes cooking dinner with Nigella look like the prelude to an orgy”. In this country, The Guardian summed it up perfectly in 2002, when it said “men love her because they want to be with her, women love her because they want to be her”.
More TV success followed, although a move into chat-show hosting was short-lived, with ITV pulling her show after just two screenings.
Undaunted, she moved in 2006 to BBC2, where her year-end offering, “Nigella’s Christmas Kitchen“, was a huge success. The final show in the series was the top-rated BBC2 broadcast that December and her suggestions sent sales of goose fat rocketing, with Tesco, Asda and Waitrose all reporting a more than 50% increase in sales!
Her books continued to sell in huge numbers and her TV shows became characterised by her casually flirtatious presenting style. This was aided greatly by the intimate settings and subdued lighting, with her step-by-step instructions delivered with barely disguised innuendo. Imagine the scene as Nigella tells you she is “carefully drizzling the creamy white sauce over the tender meat”, before looking every viewer in the eye and whispering “it doesn’t really matter if some of that purple/red sauce seeps into the cream”.
Lawson’s popularity has survived her 2013 admission in court of cocaine and cannabis use, and other headlines in the same year surrounding an ugly divorce from the advertising tycoon Charles Saatchi.
With 2 million followers on facebook, a similar number on twitter, and around 1 million Instagram followers, Nigella still has her finger firmly on the pulse of the cookery zeitgeist. In this age of social media slavery, thousands of eager disciples all over the country spend hours in front of their iPads wrestling with their creamy sauce and preparing something oozy and sticky to take to bed.
She hasn’t been on our screens for a while but Nigella is going strong.
The post The Amazing Women of British TV: Nigella Lawson appeared first on Felix Magazine.
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