The Cutprice Guignol

As many of you may know, I am a somewhat cynical person. People are bastards until proven innocent. I am most often found lounging around some bar in a leather skirt with a pretentious beer in one hand and a big book of people I don’t like in the other. But today I found my cynicism surgically removed for a few hours, reduced to the level of an infant child gurgling with unrestrained joy because someone dangled a brightly coloured plastic triangle over my cot. And the brightly coloured plastic triangle in question? The Hairy Bikers.

To misquote Nigel Slater, “there is too much talk of food being an art or a science when we are just making ourselves something to eat”. The Hairy Bikers are the ultimate embodiment of this philosophy; Si King and Dave Myers, two blustering amateur cooks from North England who rose to fame with their mixture of proper, proper food and refined laddish banter. I discovered their new series today; Hairy Bikers Everyday Gourmet, where they make unbelievably delicious food on a budget of next-to-nothing. What’s I find most endearing about them is their mangling of normally pretentious foodie phrases; gourmet becomes “GAAAWMAAAY”, canapes become “canaypes”, flavour becomes “flaaaaayver”. Their cuddly ladishness is also simply wonderful; I just glanced at the episode I have on now to find Si pelvic thrusting while the droning foodie they were shadowing was looking the other way.

I know I bring everything back round to sex, but it’s more than that with these two. They are the perfect husbands- good-natured, gently amusing, unpretentious  delightfully bumbling and chubbier than me. Though within weeks of the honeymoon I know I’d look like a blob of cream that had been strategically dressed and bewigged. And I’m still calling dibs on them both. Right? Right.