As a teenager, Rickitt became famous when he won a role on Coronation Street. I asked whether he was regarded as an A, B or C-list celebrity back in England. He said, ‘Not A. A-list is Hollywood and the Prince of … uh … William. The C-list is page three models sleeping with footballers. I’m probably B-list. I don’t worry about it. I got into this business to be an actor.’
He said soaps were his favourite medium. ‘Soaps have a stigma but I think it’s wrong. I genuinely think it’s wrong. Speaking to Ian’ – Ian McKellen – ‘when he did his stint on Coronation Street, he was shocked at the level of acting you have to do.’
Rickitt’s done long runs in West End theatre: ‘But after a year, even if you’re Laurence Olivier, it gets a bit boring.’ Did he think he was a good actor? ‘If you ask John Gielgud on his deathbed, “Are you the best actor you’ve ever been?” he would say, “I could do better tomorrow.” As an actor you’ve always got to look to do better in the next scene.’
Olivier, McKellen, Gielgud – the names of the knights dripped off his tongue. But a closer measure of his association with royalty is that one of the last television shows he appeared in before coming to New Zealand was alongside Lord Freddie Windsor, a tabloid clown who was thirty-first in line to the throne. They starred in a reality show that replicated the experience of the Argentinian rugby team whose plane crashed in the Andes in 1972, and who could survive only by eating the flesh of the dead. ‘It was a genuine documentary,’ said Rickitt. ‘We followed in their footsteps. We slept where they slept. We ate – well, not exactly what they ate, but we ate nothing but raw meat.’
Any attempt to parody Rickitt would count as a pointless exercise; he was his own vicious satirist, continually and unintentionally sending himself up something wicked. He talked about his plans to produce a historical epic set in New Zealand, made by his company, which is called Narcissus Films.
He said, ‘It’s all based on the land wars. It’s such a fascinating subject and so few people know about it.’ What era, exactly? ‘The actual land wars. You know, the settlement and the wars of the Maori up to the Treaty. That whole period, it just fascinates me. You have all these films like Braveheart and Dancing With Wolves, and you have this amazing opportunity to do it here. But it’s something you can only do with the utter, utter partnership with the Maori community. It’s their story as much as the British.’
I pointed out that the land wars were subsequent to the 1840 Treaty. ‘Yeah yeah. But that whole settlement period. And the whole, you know, what went on beforehand. And I just think … I mean, visually, it’s going to be stunning.’
I felt it fair to warn him about River Queen. Had he seen it? ‘Yeah yeah. And I’ve also got the land wars documentaries, which I’m watching on DVD. And I’ve been down and bought all the books.’
Were there any particular historical figures he found fascinating? ‘To be honest, I haven’t done enough research. But I think if we’re going to bastardise any part of it, we’d be happier bastardising the English part, creating characters who didn’t actually exist. I think the English will hold their hands up and say we did fuck a lot of the world over. I think we’ve kind of accepted that, with a bit of guilt, but we don’t mind now if we are shown to be that way in history. So we wouldn’t mind too much the idea of creating characters who might be several real characters into one.’
He said the film would be made ‘on a global scale’. He hoped filming might begin in 2009. He said it would be a serious dramatic film. He said, ‘Everybody tends to historically just go for the ridiculous.’
Yes, he was quite ridiculous, a smiling, gibbering ninny, but he was also a sweet boy. He has very good manners. As the fourth-generation Rickitt to attend Sedbergh boarding school (established in 1525), he got very good marks. He was accepted into King’s College, Cambridge to study law, and Trinity College, Dublin to study law and philosophy, although he chose acting instead. He is very good with his money: as a sideline to acting, he has made a profit out of property do-ups in England, and plans to continue that line of investment in New Zealand.
He said, ‘I have no problem with capitalism. It’s absolutely fantastic as long as it’s done with respect.’ And: ‘My mother always said there’s no point in spending money if you don’t have it. So I’ve never owned a credit card in my life.’
But this is the man who was arrested in September for shoplifting a jar of coffee, a block of cheese and a bottle of HP sauce at the Henderson Pak’nSave. He said, ‘Humiliating. All my fault. But I’m legally not allowed to say any thing more than that. I would do, entirely, because people would realise just how I was. It wasn’t me. It was them back home. All I will say is that it involved a family death. They always say bad things come in threes. Well, it was literally on the same day I had three bad bits of news – some involving death, some involving illnesses, some involving financial stuff, and it affected a large number of my very immediate family.’
Rickitt’s father is a merchant banker. A family friend who writes for the political journal The Spectator was over at the Rickitt home in Cheshire having drinks one day in 2003 when the conversation turned to voter apathy among the young. It was put to Rickitt that he write something about it. He did, and it led to his startling decision to run as a candidate for the Conservative Party. He said he approached the party on the quiet, but his name was leaked in 2005 after the leader, David Cameron, included Rickitt on his so-called A-list of one hundred potential candidates. Rickitt was subsequently slaughtered in the press as a mere minor celebrity brought in to give the party some glam.
He went nowhere fast. He had hoped to be nominated for three seats close to his family home, but they were unavailable. Instead, he lobbied for Folkestone and Hythe, and failed. Where else? ‘The other place I put my name forward for was … um … not Slough … down in … basically on the south-west coast … I can’t remember its name now. I know that’s awful of me.’
He hasn’t given up hope of running for the Conservatives – or, if he stays on in New Zealand, for the National Party. He’s had approaches, he said. That might well prove very entertaining. Rickitt said he wasn’t afraid, unlike most politicians, to voice an honest opinion. Such as? ‘Well, I agree with fox-hunting, which the Conservative Party also agree with, but they don’t like saying they do.’
Why does he support fox-hunting? ‘Several reasons. First, because it’s a tradition of the countryside, which should be upheld. Secondly, I have seen what a fox will do when it gets into a chicken coop. And hunting is actually a very methodical and relatively … Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure being chased by a pack of hounds isn’t particularly pleasurable, but what’s happening now is that foxes are all being poisoned, and they’re dying long, lingering deaths.’
I asked whether he thought other traditional aspects of English culture were being diluted. ‘Yes. We have a serious immigration problem. That’s not to say you’re anti-black or anti-Asian or anti-anything. It’s purely a question of numbers.’ He talked about his experience of speaking in schools: ‘What I saw were entire classrooms being held back because sixty percent of the pupils couldn’t speak English. And the signs in the school would be in … in … I don’t know, foreign languages.’
They are plainly not his strong suit. As a presenter at the film and television awards in November, Rickitt announced the winner of the best daily current affairs story. It went to Mihingarangi Forbes. He opened the envelope, and spluttered, ‘The winner is – oh, good Lord – somebody Forbes!’
It drew a big warm laugh. The audience clearly considered him a twit, but they were forgiving: he had come such a long way to work, was still finding his way around, and seemed a decent lad, a good chap.
[December 9]
26
Julie Dalzell
Let Them Eat Spinach
Christmas is Jesus, vaguely, and food, definitely, heartily, massively. As we approach December 25, New Zealanders are turning their thoughts to that tremendous word ‘feast’.
Such promise. A great big roast chook, a ham as fat as a pig, cream and jellies and cherries, fizz by the bucket, hot sauces and cold comforts – more, please. We can tuck in, fill our boots and knock ourselves out with immunity. It’s allowed. It’s expected. It’s Christmas.
But this did not seem to be the attitude of Julie Dalzell. I interviewed the founding editor of Cuisine magazine on a Friday morning after stopping at a nearby bakery for two mince savouries. I lingered at her front gate to finish scoffing down one savoury for breakfast, and stowed the other in my bag to eat cold for morning tea. Inside her nice home, I asked Dalzell what she was going to have on Christmas Day, and her answer sounded like a flaccid cracker popping open not with a bang, but a whimper.
‘We don’t have huge amounts,’ she said. ‘I always do hot ham, and something scallopy or something salmony for starters. We tend to eat at two, and then go for a swim.’
She sat at her kitchen table with a cup slopped full of cappuccino. I hated everything she stood for, but she seemed a good sort. I expected to meet a cheerful, formidable trout; she was a cheerful, formidable trout, fifty-five, with inevitable politics: ‘You start left and you grow right as you get older.’ I doubted she was ever especially left. She spoke with an accent cultivated at private Rangi Ruru Girls’ School. She married at twenty-five, remarried at about thirty. She has a very trim figure, and attractive hands that gently stroked a prized exhibit on the table – the very first issue of Cuisine.
The magazine is about to celebrate its twenty-first anniversary. For two decades it has kept pace with the New Zealand revolution in food, in cooking, in ingredients, in restaurants. Dalzell now works as a consultant for the Fairfax publication – we have the same paymasters. She bought Cuisine in its first year. For a song? ‘Yes. The publisher was going under, so it wasn’t exactly expensive to buy. But by that time I was madly determined it would succeed.’ It did. Dalzell lives in Herne Bay, that scented, pretty suburb tucked in by the water close to downtown Auckland; she has flowering bougainvillea in the front yard, a swimming-pool out back. Cuisine took off after she invested $250,000 in a very effective billboard campaign in 1996. She sold the magazine in 2002. ‘It was a good sum. We bought this house the year before; we called it the mansion on mortgage mountain. It’s so good to be able to pay off a mortgage …’
No doubt. I admired her business sense, and despised her role in the food revolution, which has annihilated the good honest New Zealand tearoom, and led to more and more and more espresso slophouses, drowning in focaccia, pesto, aioli, olives, sun-dried tomatoes, and other muck. ‘But tearooms are still around,’ she said. Where? She thought for a while. ‘We found one in Lumsden! That was so exciting. We were beside ourselves. We had chicken sandwiches on white bread, and a cup of tea.’ I felt like killing her. She made it sound so quaint, naughty, a wheeze. ‘And there might be one in Paekakariki,’ she said.
Because I regard modern diners as dazed, picky gluttons trying to satisfy their jaded appetites with endless blather about ingredients and menus, I suggested to her that the food revolution had made New Zealanders stupid. She said, ‘It makes them opinionated about things they’re not necessarily skilled or schooled in. But that’s okay; whatever your palette is. It makes people fashion-followers, as opposed to perhaps developing their own confidence in making a choice about what they’re going to eat. But stupid? No, no.’
Because I regard modern dining as a childish pastime, I suggested to her that the food revolution had made New Zealanders infantile. She said, ‘I think it’s our play dough. We like playing with food and making stuff. It’s a creative thing, perhaps a nurturing thing.’
Her talk of creativity and nurture was insufferable. I asked her when she last ate a Dunkin’ Donut. ‘I don’t think I’ve had one for about forty years. Are they good?’ Oh, yes. Has she breakfasted on a delicious bacon and egg muffin with a hash brown at McDonald’s? ‘No. No. I toast Vogel’s bread and tomatoes.’ I imagined her nibbling a joyless slice for breakfast on Christmas Day.
Her language was not the language of crisp, lovely doughnuts, and happy meals served in wrappers. I asked her what was ‘in’ these days at restaurants and slophouses. She said, ‘There’s a lot of risotto going on. Pork belly. And a weird thing called molecular gastronomy. It’s a very highbrow way of cooking. It’s food that doesn’t look like itself, or taste like itself.’
I asked her what she wished was ‘out’ at restaurants and slophouses. ‘Pork belly,’ she said. ‘And I do wish the fashion of having huge focaccia and basil pesto would go away. I like home-made pesto, but I don’t like pesto that sits in jars and changes its flavour from that beautiful fresh basil, pine-nutty thing to tasting of something three steps down the track.’ And then she declared: ‘Pesto was probably the biggest mistake of the ’90s.’
She was indisputably an authority on such matters. She was very exact, and possibly quite mad. I asked her to define the typical Cuisine reader; she came up with an answer that reminded me of criminal profiling.
She said, ‘She’d be forty-five to fifty. She would live perhaps in Mt Eden. She would have been perhaps a teacher, or high up in administration. She would work full time, but probably dropped down to part time now her children are beginning to leave school. She likes to have her own income. Her husband likes to cook occasionally. They will eat out once a week, and entertain at home twice a month. They earn about a hundred – yes, combined. They won’t buy a new car, but they’ll have two cars in the family.
‘And they fight over the magazine when it arrives in the mailbox. She’ll sit down and covet it with a cup of tea or glass of wine after a long day, and she will read every page, and she will renew her subscription. But she was beginning to say, “I’m not quite sure what it is, but this magazine is not quite for me anymore.” She won’t want to be rude about it, but she will let us know.’
My god, who was this ninny? I began to feel sorry for Dalzell’s ideal reader – her life was being narrowed, targeted, held upside down by the ankles in the hope subscription money would fall out of her purse. Dalzell said she had been brought in as a consultant to bring that reader back to the fold. The magazine’s editor, Simon Wilson, had had his job ‘disestablished’. He later wrote an essay in Metro about the Cuisine ‘saga’, claiming that Fairfax management simply wanted to cut costs and turn the magazine into a cash cow.
Dalzell: ‘I used to say to the writers, “You’re not writing for yourself, you’re writing for the readers.” In my opinion, which is why I was brought in, Cuisine had become a little academic. It wasn’t quite as friendly. It had some very good writing, excellent writing: Simon in his tenure raised the bar. But food-writers are not writers. It’s not their natural métier. They’re cooks.
‘Simon introduced perhaps a higher discipline to the writing, but in doing so there was a perception among our readers that they were being delivered too much information rather than inspiration. It was perceived to be a little long and complicated. It needed not to get back, but to go forward, to recognise the reader’s needs, that she’s busy, she doesn’t want too many complicated ingredients. So we needed to undress the magazine. And stop telling readers off. A tone in some of the writing was becoming a little prescriptive…’
And what was her role in all this? Was she the wedge to remove Wilson from office? ‘I wasn’t his boss,’ she said. ‘I was contracted to help the team towards a simpler, clearer, better navigation.’ I pointed out that no one is there to navigate since the magazine disestablished the editor’s position. ‘An unusual concept,’ she said, ‘but it works.’ The editor’s position has also been removed at North & South – and Metro, where Wilson is now employed as a staff writer.
Dalzell will continue to consult for Cuisine – and, next year, for another Fairfax publication, NZ House & Garden. She said, ‘I can’t move house without first putting in my herb garden and my veges. I’ve always got perpetual spinach. New Zealand spinach is a great vegetable. It grows in six weeks, it’s c
heap, it’s healthy. Anyone can grow it.’
She was suddenly possessed with a vision. She declared: ‘I hope vege gardens become the sex of the 2000s.’
I thought: The nation’s beetroots may never be the same again. And: I’m hungry. I wolfed down my morning tea as soon as I walked out of her door. It may have been the best mince savoury I’d eaten in my life.
[December 16]
27
Glynn Cardy
More Jesus, Vicar?
Some clown wrote in The Sunday Star-Times last week, ‘Christmas is about Jesus, vaguely, and food, definitely, heartily, massively.’ It turned out that I was prescient, because much the same message appeared a few days later in Auckland’s morning paper. The author was an Anglican priest, Glynn Cardy. ‘Christmas,’ he declared, ‘is about more than Jesus.’ He went on to say that Jesus is all very well and good, but religious notions needn’t concern us. It was more important that we uphold values of ‘generosity, caring, togetherness and hospitality’. As such, he wrote approvingly, Christmas is about food. ‘Food plays a major part in our Christmas communion. We give gifts of food … Food connects us.’
Except that Jesus isn’t invited, or at least not at the head of the table. As we prepare to celebrate Christmas, the last rooster I expected to put God on a diet was a vicar. I went to see Cardy. He was a very nice man, forty-eight years old, his hair thinning on top. He possessed a lovely smile and a round, smooth face. He really did rub his hands with delight. His article had done the trick: ‘It’s got traction. You’re here!’
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