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Nick Riddle takes the BBC's tasty nostalgia trip through 1960s Britain, based on the memoirs of food writer Nigel Slater. The complex relationship between food and love is beautifully explored he says.

Buried away in the Christmas TV schedules, like a dessert at the back of the pantry, was Toast, a lovingly shot adaptation of Nigel Slater’s memoir of a sixties English childhood.

The complex relationship between food and love is beautifully explored: Nigel’s mother (Victoria Hamilton), warm and affectionate but hampered by chronic asthma and an absence of culinary skills, is neatly symbolised by the toast she habitually offers up at the dinner table. His hidebound father (Ken Stott, magnificent as Middle-England stodge made flesh) bridles at Nigel’s tentative forays into exotic dishes like Spaghetti Bolognese.

His mother’s death and her replacement in his father’s affections by Mrs Potter (Helena Bonham Carter) kick off a bitter struggle for supremacy, expressed through cooking; never has the quest for a perfect lemon meringue had such high emotional stakes. Lee Hall (Billy Elliott) uses the choicest cuts from Slater’s book for his screenplay, and the design is spot-on in its evocation of a drab but cosy sixties. Oscar Kennedy and Freddie Highmore share acting duties as our hero, the former with particular distinction as a precocious 11-year-old foodie in a gastronomic wasteland.

 

Nick Riddle on 25th February 2011
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