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(Getranscribeerd door TurboScribe. Upgrade naar Onbeperkt om dit bericht te verwijderen.) Get down, smile, and I like it.

Get down, say, uh.

Get down, say, uh.

Till you feel your, uh.

Get down, ladies.

The 35 to 54-year-old generation of

men, the grumpiest of any group in history.

We used to be fit, but now we're

fighting the flab and fed up.

Too old to be out clubbing, doing drugs

and pulling women, too young to be playing

bowls in the park or taking extended winter

holidays in Benidorm, wedged grumpily somewhere in between.

We've cut down on drinking, given up smoking,

and our bodies, which once were worshipped, have

gone to hell in a handbasket.

Is my body a temple?

Erm, if my body...

Oh, I don't know, actually, that's a tough

one.

Is my bo...

HE LAUGHS HE CLEARS HIS THROAT HE LAUGHS

Is my...

HE LAUGHS Is my body a temple?

HE LAUGHS My body's a pretty kind of

grotty temple.

Just look at it.

Is my body a temple?

Just look at it.

Of course it is.

It's a bit of an Acropolis of a

temple nowadays.

My body...

Oh, please give me strength.

You have to live within your skin and

age 57.

I can hardly say my body's a temple.

I haven't treated my body as a temple.

I've really more treated it as a kind

of public urinal.

It's a skip, my body.

My body is only a temple to the

extent that all the attractive bits have been

plundered and put in the British Museum.

Basically, as regards my body and how I

look after it, I'm probably reading about 9

.7 on the don't-give-a-toss metre.

You know, you reach a certain point in

life where your body wants to be something

you don't want it to be.

My body wants to be perfectly spherical.

When we were kids, food was a simple

pleasure.

Fish and chips, eaten out of a newspaper

with a real newsprint on it.

Meat pie and chips, cooked in animal fat,

saturated in grease, liberally sprinkled with salt, drowned

in vinegar, or bangers and beans.

Toad in the hole, spotted dick, bubble and

squeak, all that farting.

And there was nothing else to do.

And then there was toast and dripping.

Simple pleasures in our simple lives.

We had brown food and green food and

ice cream.

We'd eat things like stuffed heart.

Any sort of offal we'd eat, stuffed heart.

Pigs' trotters, tripe.

Brines.

I remember as a kid having brines on

bread and butter, all mashed up.

It was fantastic.

Look at the look he's giving me there.

Beautiful stuff.

When our grumpies were young men, there was

a cafe on every corner, where the chef

would come out of the toilet without washing

his hands, cook you fatty chips in enough

grease to control John Travolta's quiff, and you'd

leave full to bursting and five bob worse

off.

I can remember the days in London where

there were some fantastic restaurants where you could

get all the classic English food, like a

shepherd's pie.

I know of only two in London now,

just two, where you can get real traditional

great English food.

And then it all began to change.

The staff you used to learn from your

grandma started becoming show business.

Pioneers in a long line of celebrity chefs

who'd go on to overcrowd every corner of

the TV schedules were Fanny and Johnny Craddock.

And you begin by this very familiar gesture,

loosening all the skin.

You see, like this.

Incidentally, this, like me, is an old boiler.

Fanny Craddock, I just...

A nice, inexpensive old boiler.

I didn't like her at all.

I mean, it was just like...

Even then, it was television, funnily enough.

It wasn't...

I could see then that it wasn't about

teaching people to cook nice food, it was

about her being a bossy woman.

No, Johnny, not at the Albert Hall.

As kids, we all sniggered at all those

horrible jokes about a pant in the country.

Some of us are still telling them.

Next week, I'm going to show you how

to make your sausage skins look like Johnny's.

And Johnny went, and I'll be showing you

how to make your doughnuts look like Fanny's.

Then a new kitchen dominatrix took us by

the ear to guide us towards a whole

new attitude to food.

And, boy, did she make it exciting.

We're going to start our potato adventure with

a very special recipe for mashed potatoes.

She says, I think I'd better tell you

how to cook potatoes.

You take a pan.

A pan is a metal implement you'll find

in the kitchen.

The kitchen is a room at the back

of the house.

A house is a building which...

Now, I'm going to show you two ways

of boiling an egg.

I don't know why I had the hots

for Delia, but I just thought I'd...

Every time she sort of, like, crumpled something

or whatever it was into the, you know,

into the bowl and bent forward a little

bit, I used to have these almightily bad

thoughts.

I call her the Volvo of TV cooks,

you see, and she misunderstood me.

She thought I meant she was the Volvo.

Yeah.

OK.

I thought you thought I said something else.

Volvo of TV cooks.

I'd said it on the basis that she

was the safest pair of hands on the

telly.

She thought I meant she was boring.

So I call it mashed potatoes with cheese,

and that's exactly what it is.

It's mashed potatoes and cheese.

I've actually been on a couple of cooking

programmes.

They actually had me on Can't Cook, Won't

Cook, and I set fire to the kitchen

and they never had me back.

In the good old days, while we played

outside after school, Mum would light up a

cigarette so the ash would fall in your

dinner as she cooked, take a nice chop

with enough fat on it to insulate a

whale and fry it up in dripping.

The vegetables were boiled to buggery, mashed and

served.

Sure, it set you well on the way

to a coronary, but at least it had

the virtue of simplicity.

In the old days, you used to boil,

you used to fry, you used to cook,

you used to roast, you used to poach.

Nowadays, you cook it off.

I'll just cook that off.

I'll just roast that through.

I'll just roast that off.

I'll sweat that down.

I'll cook that down.

I said, it's cooking down the same as

cooking through.

It's sweating down, sweating off.

When you roast something down, it's the same

as roasting it off.

Oh, drizzled with.

You know, you're pouring some stuff on it.

You're not drizzling anything.

I just drizzled some olive oil.

Didn't you just pour it then?

You poured it like that.

No, I drizzled it.

No, you poured it, but you waggled your

hand that you did it.

Before we knew where we were, eating, which

was something you used to do to prevent

yourself from dying or getting rickets, had turned

into entertainment.

Where once the most exotic it got was

fish and chips or the wimpy, now we

had a choice of foods from most of

the nations in the world.

Suddenly there's Chinese and Indian and Indonesian and

Vietnamese and Cambodian and Italian and French and

Spanish and Scandinavian and Korean and Nepalese and

every other blooming country in the United Nations.

And they're all there to tempt us with

new and subtle tastes, exotic dishes brought to

treat our discerning palates by humble artisans from

far-off lands.

The kebab is a marvellous post-drinking thing.

It's sort of...

It's meat and yet it isn't meat.

It's bread and yet it isn't bread.

You know, it's big and it's there.

And it's perfect.

At 12 o'clock at night when you've

had a few too many and it's greasy

and it's full of flavour and it's got

chilli in it and sort of, you know,

tomato and onion and lovely slices of greasy

doughnut kebab.

Brilliant!

You know, but that's the way it should

be.

But, you know, I wake up the next

morning and thought, oh, my God, what have

I done?

It's an amazing thing that 11 pints of

lager will do to you.

After the 11th pint goes down, this whole

thing flashes in front of you that just

goes curry.

Can you imagine this country if there'd never

been immigration?

Where would you go after 7 o'clock

in the evening?

Where would you go when you're pissed and

starving at 11 o'clock?

Oh, let's go to the all-night liver

and onions place.

I think the scone palace is still open.

We could have a cream tea.

I wonder if the grease has some sort

of effect to why drunk people are drawn

to grease.

It's a combination of salt and sugar which

human beings cannot resist.

It's a sort of like, mm, I want

that taste.

Oh, yes, we want it, all right.

It's just that we can't have it anymore.

The food police have put the fear of

God in us.

When our grumpy old men were 17, we

could down six pints of lager and a

lamb vindaloo six nights out of seven and

still be as thin as a stick.

Today, every second item on the telly is

about obesity.

Every third item is about a new killer

disease.

And before the next programme, there are five

adverts for more burgers.

Yes, I have been pissed, staggered out of

the pub and ordered a triple mega gut

-busting McDonald's.

I've done it, I'm guilty.

I confessed and I had supersized fries as

well.

But it's OK, McDonald's, I'm not going to

sue you.

It was my responsibility.

I don't drink, I don't smoke, I'm not

married anymore, I've got fuck all going for

me except for my music.

So I'm in the odd night out to

go and have a nice meal.

And I'll sometimes go the whole hog, I

must admit.

I have been known to go out and

have the full Big Mac meal.

It doesn't really count as calories, in a

way.

Your body doesn't catch up.

You can actually eat a Big Mac and

chips and go home and have your lovely

steak and chips and they don't interfere with

each other.

Yes, and England is a great footballing nation.

But just now and again, even our grumpy

old men like to push the boat out.

Treat the missus or your mates to a

visit to one of those restaurants where the

so-called celebrity chefs compete with each other

for how vile and abusive they are to

their staff and their customers or how much

they dare to overcharge you for a mushroom.

If you're stupid enough to want to eat

in their silly restaurants, you have to book

six months in advance, can't get a table

unless you have the same surname as an

actor or a food critic, you have to

be out in two hours because there's another

sitting at 10.30 and you come out

half-starved and a £150 lighter, wishing you'd

given the supercilious prat of a waiter a

good slapping.

Have you eaten here before?

Let me explain our concept.

And you go, no, no, no, before you

start, let me explain my concept.

This is dinner, it's my dinner and I'm

hungry.

That's my concept.

Now, do you think you could fit your

servile little body around that concept?

I hate the food prepared by pretentious, egomaniac

chefs that think they're doing you a favour

by allowing you to eat in their restaurant

and pay through the nose for a portion

that you would need a rocket scientist's microscope

to see.

The fussing that goes on sometimes, you know,

is everything all right, sir?

You know, you feel like saying, no, my

girlfriend left me three weeks ago.

Generally speaking, I'm not very confident at the

moment.

What can you do about it if you

really care?

It was awful.

It was like having a heart transplant without

an anaesthetic.

You were sitting there with the entire surgical

team around you.

You'd pick up a glass and the glass

nurse would fill it with liquid.

You'd put down your fork and the fork

assistant would fork off with another fork.

It was terrible.

I really couldn't bear it.

The food was good, but I didn't notice.

So the best kind of restaurant is they

can plonk it on your plate and they

can bugger off and go to the pub.

So you sit down and study the menu.

It's all written in French or Italian in

what we're supposed to believe is the chef's

handwriting.

And it's just another way of making you

feel inferior.

Maybe you don't speak French or Italian.

You're too intimidated to ask.

The waiter is making you feel like an

idiot.

And you end up ordering marinated calves' brains

when all you wanted was a prawn cocktail.

And if you could translate it, what would

it say?

Grass-fed chicken kept by happy peasants on

the slopes of the Andes, allowed to choose

their own method of death, and then lovingly

fricasseed in butter from contented cows in a

pan made from copper mined by Carmelite monks.

And I did disgusting dishes like rabbit with

parsley sauce and mango puree, and I want

to vomit now.

But in the old days, it was what

they wanted.

I mean, anything went.

You put a bit of kiwi on the

Dover sole.

Wow, that's...

That's art.

I was the host and they gave me

a menu which had the various dishes on,

but it didn't have a price, but it

had a number on it.

I thought, well, that's a bit odd.

You don't order food by numbers.

It's not a sort of a wine list.

It's not a Chinese takeaway.

So I said, well, what's this number then?

It said 1-9-9-4.

And he said, oh, sir, that was the

date on which the chef created that particular

dish.

You know, I lent over.

I was sick on the carpet.

And then there's the latest stupid nonsense.

Instead of arranging the food around the plate

so you can see what you're eating, it's

all stacked up in a high pile.

Does anyone know what that's all about?

It's like the plate is that big for

a good reason.

It's so you can spread all the food

all over it.

Don't waste the edges by piling it all

up.

Bit sticking up here and little splashes of

this and that.

They pile it all up in the middle

and then put squiggles on the top.

You always left the feeling you needed a

packet of munchies because you never had any

to eat.

It was all pictures.

I don't know about you, but to me

a picture is not to be eaten, it's

to be looked at.

And when you finally get to order, you

always seem to want what the bloke on

the other table is having.

After I've ordered the linguine marinara, I look

up and there on the other side of

the restaurant is a man lifting an enormous

hamburger and that's what I want.

I think probably all men in particular have

had the experience of just ordering the menu

and just thinking, can we just have some

chips, please?

Can we at least have mashed potatoes?

Does it have to be, you know, all

these vegetables that you've never heard of?

But you can't actually say that because at

any sign of dissent, anything short of grovelling

and sycophantic appreciation of the fine art of

the chef, you risk humiliating rebuke.

My father, God rest him, he went to

a French restaurant and he disapproved of garlic

and he made me, because I speak French,

ask the waiter, could he order something, is

there anything without garlic in a French restaurant?

And the bloke said, this is a French

restaurant, everything has garlic and threw us out.

So 45 minutes on, I did say something

like, well, nice to see you've finally arrived.

It was some, you know, quiet, quietly ironical

remark like that.

And feeling pretty pleased with myself, I chucked

into the food and da-da-da.

And as I was going out, the bloke

who I think was running was by the

cash desk and he said, we've had enough

of people like you.

You've been in here before, haven't you, doing

it?

I said, this is the first time I've

been to this...

He said, look, I don't want to see

you here again.

Get out.

I never want to...

I said, this is the first time I've

been to your fucking restaurant.

It's the sort of reverse principle of what

used to happen at those old Greek kebab

houses, when you went in and they'd say,

nice to see you again, sir.

It was the first time you'd ever been

there in your life, you know.

And having charged you 25 quid for a

piece of steak the size of a snuff

box, or 20 quid for less cod than

they put in the average fish finger, next

comes the most outrageous rip-off of all,

the wine list.

And our grumpies have very little patience for

the bore for England Ponce at your table

who wants to make an exhibition of himself.

All this sniffing the cork and sniffing...

I know when it's gone off.

That's about all I know, is if the

wine's gone off, I can tell.

I think that people who pay absolutely squillions

of pounds for wine and go on about

it all the time, I do suspect an

enormous level of chicanery there.

I'm sorry, I do.

Oh, it's so confusing, isn't it, what to

do about wines, you know, with all the

different sort of exotic descriptions of them.

Do people just go by price?

Is it just me?

In the end, it's, well, that's too much,

too much, too cheap, too cheap, about there.

I gave a glass of wine to a

friend of mine, it was a wine, so

he said, very nice, no nose.

Can't smell, I don't know, no nose.

Was that good, was that bad, I don't

know.

The stuff they write on the back of

their bottles, particularly in Australia, is just absurd,

you know.

Peaches, tangerines, passion fruit, leather notes, cigar boxes.

Leather notes, he said, leather, I'm getting chocolate,

I'm getting burning rubber.

Elements of Pepsodent may be perceived in the

lower dregs.

If I'm drinking wine and I was getting

chocolate and burning rubber, I'd be looking around

the kitchen thinking, hello.

Stone fruit, peaches, grapefruit, hazelnut flavours, underscored by

butterscotch and honey.

It's a little overblown, I just need to

know if I'm going to like it or

not.

Red wine, it's always very, very jabby.

I think it's extremely jabby.

I always think they're talking about their job

as a TV wine critic, which is very

jabby.

I'm getting blackcurrant, I'm getting damson, I'm getting

piss.

What is the point in spending a fortune

of money getting arseholed when you can do

it for five quid and half the time?

How much is that bottle of Chianti there

in the little raffia basket?

That's 40p, sir.

But we've got a special offer of four

gallons of it for 70p.

That's the one.

So if the prospect doesn't appeal of being

bullied by egomaniac chefs and coming out of

the restaurant starving, there's no such risk at

the other end of the food chain.

No, no.

Down here, if you ask for a small

Coke, you'll get a bucketful.

A medium is half a gallon, and a

large would put out the great fire of

London.

Ask for some popcorn, and it comes in

a dustbin.

Ask for a hamburger, and you get extra

fries for free.

Everywhere we look, it's go large this and

triple extra that.

A vast choice of super-saturated, cholesterol-engorged,

gut-wrenching junk.

So, how's the diet going?

The diet's going...

Thank you for asking, actually.

But you're asking, I presume, on the assumption

that everybody at some stage is on a

diet.

My diet is, at best, sporadic.

I'm on two diets at the moment.

There's not enough food on one.

It's not bad, it's all right.

And I found it utterly painless.

And you could say that because you know

everybody's on a diet.

There is a body of work.

There's a body under here just rippling.

Unfortunately, it's rippling with the wrong thing at

the moment.

But it will one day ripple the right

way, and I will be a 60-year

-old Adonis.

So, we're all on a diet.

But not for our grumpy old men, the

Atkins, or the food combining.

No Weight Watchers for us.

No, we're grumpy old men, for heaven's sake.

We don't ask for directions, we don't listen

to advice.

We know better than anyone.

I went on holiday a few months ago,

and I came back and thought, God, I

am fat.

I am really, really, really fat.

And I just didn't eat a thing for

four or five days till over half a

stone went from doing that.

And then, a couple of lettuces, and a

stone and a half.

Easy peasy.

You just don't eat.

I am trying to diet at the moment.

I may not look like I am, but

I am.

What I've suddenly realised is all you need

to do is to pick food up and

feel how heavy it is, right?

If you pick up a piece of meat,

it's heavy, right?

You pick up some vegetables, they're light, OK?

You put vegetables down your body, it ain't

going to make you heavier.

You put a lot of meat down your

body, it is.

End of story, as far as I'm concerned.

I'll write a book about it, but that's

the way I feel.

Mars bar diet, one time, do you remember

that?

Mars bar diet, beaten eggs diet, all sorts

of mad diets.

The Jennifer Aniston diet, the heart attack diet,

this celebrity diet, that celebrity diet, one cal,

low cal, light, all made by the same

people who made the stuff that was bad

for you in the first place.

The Tony Hawk's brilliant way of losing weight.

And what it is, is you eat less

and you exercise more, on day one.

On day two, you eat less and you

exercise more.

On day three, you spin the whole thing

around and you exercise more and you eat

less.

The brutal truth, which is that if you

want to be less fat, don't eat so

much, is too simple.

Nowhere do you see an advertising hoarding saying,

just stop stuffing your face, you fat bastard.

Birds of prey bred in captivity, if they

eat a Cornish pasty and some chips, they

can't fly then.

They have to keep walking until they're the

right weight.

This is true, the right weight to fly.

And so in nature, you never see a

kestrel hovering up a motorway looking really fat,

a big fat kestrel, you know, it doesn't

happen, because food to them is not socialised

like it is.

Kestrels don't think, let's get all the other

kestrels in the region around and sit down

and have a few voles and a glass

of wine, because food to them is completely

functional, they just eat what they need.

Thin gruel, no fags, water.

That's it.

That's what it comes to in the end,

if you enjoy yourself too much.

So what the hell are our grumpy old

men to do?

We're assaulted on all sides by dire warnings

from the food fascists about how chickens are

kept in conditions nearly as cramped as the

London underground, how cows are forced to eat

their own brains and burnt toast gives you

cancer.

Turn on the news, and there's a story

about the endless supply of food out of

a Jacques Cousteau nightmare brought over in hand

luggage from distant continents.

So, it's not surprising that occasionally, just occasionally,

a grumpy might resort in desperation to one

of these.

57 varieties of nuts and seeds or organic

lettuce steeped in untreated sewage.

Tofu, corn and muesli give me strength.

Health food shops are just terrifying because there

are all these things there that are apparently

good for you that I'd never heard of

and I'd never bought.

So just going into one, you think, my

God, I've had no selenium.

I always thought it was the name of

a girl I used to go out with.

Why is this stuff?

And the vitamins that you're clearly depriving yourself

of, just terrifying.

I've been in health food shops because I

like a good laugh.

I don't get the whole thing about this

organic lark about why you pay 15 times

more for a lettuce leaf that's not been

sprayed with something that will actually kill all

the diseases that are actually on the organic

one that are going to make you shit

for a week.

Two carrots, one of which is organically grown,

one of which is not.

The non-organically grown virtually glows in the

dark.

It's that big, straight, easy to peel and

then there's this little thing like a pensioner's

penis.

You can't peel it when you have finally

got the skin off it.

You're left with almost nothing.

You put it in boil, it's gone.

If you actually stopped eating everything that's supposedly

bad for you, you'd end up, you wouldn't

be eating anything.

Yes.

Just at the moment you might believe you've

alighted on the healthy alternative, along comes one

of our grumpy old men with more brains

than is good for him to ruin your

day.

The most potent cancer-causing agent in food

is the kind of mould that grows on

things like badly stored peanuts.

It's got some really, really powerful cancer-causing

chemicals in it.

If you go to Tesco, the food may

be a bit fluorescent, but it sure as

hell isn't mouldy and so it doesn't have

these cancer-causing chemicals in it.

Go to the man with porridge in his

beard.

You'll find the food may taste good, but

by God, it's full of cancer-causing chemicals.

Stay clear of health foods.

That's my health advice.

Yes, we long for the days when things

were simpler.

These horrible deeds took place well out of

sight and well out of mind.

And no-one felt the insatiable urge to

ram unpalatable facts down our throats.

We were happy innocents.

We just ate what we were given, no

questions asked.

Today, everyone has a food preference.

I don't do dairy.

I don't do wheat.

I don't do gluten.

Or, no, sorry, I don't eat anything that

has a face.

I was a hypocritical vegetarian because I would

get drunk and sneak out and eat meat

at night in dark alleys.

And I would go to Kentucky Fried Chicken

and then hide on the floor in an

alleyway like an American werewolf.

And then one morning I woke up naked

in Dewhurst and I realised that I ate

more meat than people who weren't vegetarians.

Sometimes you get the feeling it's about getting

attention.

It's, look at me, look how delicate I

am, look how important I am, look at

all the difficulties I've got with this.

It's like, you know, I want some attention!

You go into a restaurant and you look

at the menu and there's always a little

VVVVV saying, this is a vegetarian.

And whenever anybody asks, is there a vegetarian

alternative, yes, they can piss off and eat

somewhere else.

Ten years ago, if there was a rocket,

people were probably rightly spraying it with weed

killer.

It was up in the pavement, oh, the

rocket's up again, they'd be kicking it to

death in between the cracks.

Now, some bastard has got it out, shoved

it into little sort of, you know, dishes,

and he's saying organic hand-washed rocket and

serving it up to you at about 25

quid a throw.

It has a light peppery taste.

Well, yes, so does pepper, so do envelopes.

There are some people who claim to like

vegetarian food and, you know, there are some

people who claim that, you know, there are

aliens invading the earth and Elvis Presley's still

alive.

And I think, what's the point of having

a meal if an animal hasn't died in

vain and in great pain as well?

So, there's no getting away from it.

In the end, we are what we eat.

Our food is full of fat, and guess

what?

We're fat.

It's well past its sell-by date, and

so are we.

Our food is full of preservatives and...

No, that's where the theory breaks down.

We are all deteriorating fast.

All we want in life is a glass

of beer and a bloody great bag of

crisps, and to be left a bloody loan.

Is that likely to happen?

Is it hell?

We're doomed to be provoked and harassed and

generally put upon until we're all dead, and

until that happy day we're all grumpy, grumpy

old men.

Heaven help us.

The beast in me Is caged by frail

and fragile bonds I have a strange craving

for beans on toast now.

Grumpiness Galore on BBC3 in half an hour

in the American version of The Office.

Sun rages at the stars God help The

beast in me The beast in me