By 1996 Britain had suffered years of nouvelle cuisine. Steamed or tossed low-fat fare on octagonal plates.
Tiny portions. Blobs and gels and smears and micro basil.
We tried to delight in mung beans and tofu: dutifully peeled off and discarded our chicken skin.
By 1996 many would have killed for suet pudding – and then, at just the right moment, Two Fat Ladies exploded onto our screens.
Despite their extraordinary, cackling rapport, Jennifer Paterson, 68, and Clarissa Dickson Wright, 59, scarcely knew each other.
They might have met at a party, they thought.
They were brought together by the award-winning TV producer Patricia Llewelyn, who had a nose for television magic and scented some serious chemistry.
Behelmeted and begoggled, Jennifer and Clarissa tore up and down these islands by Triumph Thunderbird motorcycle and sidecar.
Jennifer, of beady little eyes and pursed lips, wore outsized glasses. Clarissa was outsized, period. Of necessity, the sidecar was double-width.
Clarissa Dickson-Wright (right) and Jennifer Paterson launched their cookery show with the motto 'deprivation is out, indulgence is in'
They rarely entered cities and never hung out with steeple-fingered restaurateurs. Rather, the Two Fat Ladies hit some hedgerowed parish in a sleepy shire, visited a farmer, gamekeeper or fishing smack for fresh local produce, and then cooked up delicious calorific fair for lucky locals.
Cathedral choristers, a village cricket team, a girls’ private school, Cambridge rowers, Welsh male voice choirs, Army barracks, some childlike nuns… that sort of clientele.
Few episodes passed, as our hosts stuffed a goose or enthused over beef dripping, without a dig at ‘manky vegetarians’.
Golden butter spread thick and lush over crusty bread; an entire jug of cream tipped blithely into a gently plopping casserole.
Oddly, the one thing we never saw them cooking was pasta – perhaps because, in parallel, Patricia Llewelyn was bringing on another sensational discovery, the baby-faced charmer Jamie Oliver.
Jennifer and Clarissa had at once the mien of faintly scary dinner ladies and the sort of grand dames whose beautifully turned vowels evoked a better yesterday.
Dickson-Wright pictured enjoying a full cooked breakfast at the Ace Cafe
The days of the Raj; the idyllic world of PG Wodehouse. Kedgeree for breakfast; tea on the lawn at half-past three. In hindsight – one chocolate box village or minor cathedral town after another – it felt like Midsomer Murders.
Both Jennifer Paterson and Clarissa Dickson Wright were of exotic and notionally privileged backgrounds.
And both, incidentally, jolly but earnest Catholics: Jennifer’s uncle, Anthony Bartlett, was long a key retainer of successive Cardinals at Westminster Cathedral, and from 1980 she shared his tiny flat.
Jennifer – whose father had served with the Seaforth Highlanders in both world wars – was born in India; had only settled in England in her forties. Clarissa was of aristocratic stock; her father a celebrated doctor whose patients had included the Queen Mum.
Brilliant, an avid pipe-smoker, she had qualified as a barrister when still only 21 – a record smashed only in 2013 – and by 1996 had lived in Scotland for years, running a cookbook shop in Edinburgh.
Two Fat Ladies was an enormous hit. Some 3.5million viewers tuned in regularly and, in all, four series were commissioned. The show was snapped up overseas.
Americans, especially, were enchanted. And when Jennifer and Clarissa toured Australia, 26,000 folk in Melbourne turned out to see them.
Two Fat Ladies has been repeated ever since, and is repeated still; a classic 1997 episode, where Jennifer and Clarissa gruffly prepare a Christmas feast for the boys of Winchester Cathedral Choir, still pops up most years in the BBC’s festive schedule.
But there is a pathos about Two Fat Ladies. Cancer would fell Patricia Llewelyn at just 55.
Though long a mainstay of the London party scene – and for years resident cook at The Spectator – Jennifer was desperately poor. In that Christmas episode, she joked she and her uncle owned so little that any burglar would probably leave a tip.
The Two Fat Ladies enjoying an afternoon tea
Clarissa’s childhood had been blighted by alcoholism and violence: in one drunken rage, her crazed father beat her up so badly he broke several of her ribs.
She duly inherited a vast, £12million fortune from her mother – and drank through the lot, till attaining blessed and abiding sobriety.
Neither ever married and – kindly as she was – Clarissa’s at times explosive temper on set earned her the monicker, ‘Krakatoa.’ On no account to be underestimated, one dark night she was jumped by two muggers. Both youths fetched up in intensive care.
I n a cruel kicker, Two Fat Ladies had to be abandoned midway through the fourth series, for Jennifer Paterson was gravely ill.
Friends fussed: the Prince of Wales sent organic tomato soup and caviar to her bedside – but, on 10 August 1999, she succumbed to lung cancer.
Clarissa Dickson Wright soldiered on. To some surprise, in 1998 she had been elected Rector of Aberdeen University.
She now wrote a widely praised history of English cooking and made such series as Clarissa and the Countryman – until the BBC cancelled it, queasy at her passion for fieldsports and the hunt.
A related book deal fell through: she had to file for bankruptcy and lost her little shop. And with extraordinary courage rebuilt.
Clarissa’s 2007 autobiography, Spilling the Beans, was acclaimed; further cookbooks sold well and she deigned to make another series or two for BBC 4 – her finances so restored that she turned down a lucrative but, by her lights, self-demeaning supermarket deal.
We also now know what awaited the quiet little platoons of Britain Jennifer and Clarissa had so celebrated.
There was no place for that world in New Labour, from abolition of the Assisted Places Scheme and the criminalisation of fox hunting.
Not that Clarissa Dickson Wright would ever sit quietly at the back and shut up. Latterly living in Inveresk, in 2012, she appeared on Fieldsports Britain to extol the nutritional value of badgers.
‘There’s going to be a cull,’ she pointed out, ‘so rather than just throw them in the landfill site, why not eat them? I would have no objection to eating badgers. I have no objection to eating anything very much, really.’
On one front she had undoubted cause for bitterness. Had Two Fat Ladies been an in-house BBC production, she would have enjoyed repeat fees for the rest of her life. It wasn’t, so she didn’t.
Clarissa Dickson Wright, though, refused to be bitter.
She died in Edinburgh Royal Infirmary in March 2014, just 66 years old.
Of that supermarket offer, she chuckled, ‘I don’t regret it. I used to say that all I had left in life was my integrity and my cleavage. Now it’s just my integrity.’