Award-winning foodie podcast, Dish from Waitrose is back for a seventh season, with Nick Grimshaw and Angela Hartnett OBE interviewing more famous faces.
Guests lined up include actors Billy Porter and Chris O’Dowd, comedian Dara Ó Briain, actress Joanna Lumley, actresses Keeley Hawes and Simone Ashley.
The new series launches with an in depth interview with Steve Coogan, who talks about his favourite sausages and his career.
The Alan Partridge star told the podcast: “I like the Walls sausages, not the fancy ones." He likes pies too. “It's sort of comforting and a winter, winter sort of food. Quite nice, if it is winter. Yeah, yeah, uh, pie, pie, yeah, I mean, as long as it's not too thick. But, but, yeah, it should be a full pie experience.”
He has a fondness for simple food: "“When I did The Trip with Rob Brydon we went on all these fancy restaurants. But I did find myself craving more simple food. After a while of being bombarded and spoiled by, this is sort of assault on the senses. Even just craving a fried egg sandwich, you know. And also, I started to get put off by the sort of fetishistic eight course menus, where it takes longer to describe the food than it does to eat it. Someone stands there, tells you what it all is, and you're going, all right, get on with it. And then you go, right [swallowing sound] That’s interesting. But, so, yeah. I mean, I like that sort of farm to table. It's like honesty. I mean, when I grew up, my mum cooked all the food because that was the most cost-effective way of feeding the family. And I was jealous of all the kids at school who had all the processed food, like Findus Crispy Pancakes and all that stuff.”
He expanded on The Trip with Rob Brydon: It's sort of this hybrid thing where you can say stuff and make stuff up. Rob and I, we had a gentleman's agreement that we were allowed to take the piss out of each other and know that we risk upsetting each other. Cause if you really want to needle someone, you know someone well, you know what buttons to press. To wind them up, so we did that. And sometimes it would get quite frosty. Probably on my part, you know. Funnily enough, I play up to being precious and pretentious. There's some truth in it, but not, you know, we always overplay it, and Rob plays being Mr. Entertainer and he's more, you know, he's a bit more nuanced than that. A bit. As two normal people, and our conversation is really boring.
“When we did The Trip to Italy, Anna Wintour at Vogue flew us over there just to take one photograph, or two photos to go in Vogue. So, we went back to a place called Ravello on the Amalfi Coast, which is like heaven. It's like up on the mountaintop and it's the most idyllic garden. And Rob and I, before we did this photo shoot, let's go for dinner, in one of the restaurants, we'd been to when we were filming The Trip, and there was a couple who'd gone there on holiday because they'd seen The Trip, and they wanted to go to the restaurant we'd eaten in, and we were there eating in the restaurant. ‘Do you just live here?’ ‘In this restaurant?’ And eat here…they were like, it sort of blew their minds.”
He also revealed that the next Alan Partridge series will be about Alan's mental health: “I'm doing some stuff at the moment, and it does make me laugh, so…I make notes in my phone, I think, I have a funny idea. I'm on the train, and I'm chuckling to myself. I will laugh at myself as a Partridge comes into my head, and put it in my phone, on my own. Or I'll look in a shop window and think about, I might say, oh, what would Alan say about that. I'm still doing it now thirty years later, so it's like a condition now. There'd be a, an acronym for it, you know. Um, but um, so I do like writing it with the Gibbons brothers, the two writers who've been doing it for fifteen years.
We've been doing the podcast and, I mean, we think of funny scenarios. Alan gets trapped in a porch. You know the glass door. You know the glass door just outside the front door? Some semi-detached houses have. So, in his house, he goes out there, she's gone out, and he slams the door, he’s trapped in the porch for eight hours. But he's recording his podcast. So, he has to, he has to start looking at the leaflets on the floor, like pizza delivery leaflets. And things like that, um…and you know, so, so it's all about… So, so things like that, it’s really sort of stupid things, and then, and you sort of think of all kinds of things, funny things that can happen. So, we've done a TV series, it's called, um, How Are You? [in Alan Partridge voice] How Are You? It's Alan Partridge. But, um… it's about mental health, actually. Alan's trying to jump on the mental health bandwagon. He knows that he can get back on TV if he talks about something important.”
“When we write it. Because when I do, I can't laugh because I'm, although I do, ‘course. I start crying laughing at something. For me to try and describe it is so risqué some of the stuff, I can't even describe, you have to just listen to it. But there's some stuff, you know there is some stuff that’s so wrong that it makes me laugh, because it's like there's some things he says that you could - no one could say. And I certainly couldn't say. But because you - the audience know who he is and that he's sort of ill-informed but is trying his best. He's not an evil person. He's just a fool. But, and sometimes the fool says things that people secretly agree with. If I want to sort of take the mick out of someone I don't like, I just make Alan say that they're his best friend. Rather than attack them [laughs]. In fact, the last Alan Partridge book, it says foreword by Grant Shapps. And there is no foreword in the book at all.”
The Steve Coogan episode is available now. Subscribe to Dish here.
Picture by Harriet Langford
