The cookery legend says food on TV is more about entertainment than education.
Delia Smith has vowed never to make another TV show.
The 71-year-old announced her retirement from the small screen after a 40-year career at a trade show in Birmingham where she was demonstrating her new range of baking tins.
She said: "When I started, there was further education in the BBC; now you have to entertain. You have someone telling me I haven’t got time to show this, or I haven’t got time to show that."
Delia's career
Delia started her culinary career as a cookery writer for the Daily Mirror’s magazine in 1969. She wrote her first cookery book, How To Cheat At Cooking, in 1971.
Her first TV series was Family Fare, which aired on BBC1 in 1973. But her biggest successes were arguably Delia Smith’s Cookery Course, which began in the late 70s, and How To Cook, which aired in the late 1990s.
The accompanying recipe books have sold millions of copies. And when she recommended a product on one of her shows, the so-called ‘Delia effect’ meant that sales went through the roof.
Aptly enough, her final TV series was the ‘greatest hits’-style retrospective Delia Through The Decades in 2010.
Most recently, she has been the face of Waitrose, along with Heston Blumenthal. That deal ended in January.
She’s now concentrating on her cookwear and website.
The greatest?
In a poll conducted here on lovefood, you voted Delia the second most influential TV cook of all time, just behind Jamie Oliver.
She may have been slightly stilted on screen a couple of times (as the below clip of her making spag bol demonstrates), but there’s no doubt that her TV series led to far more adventurous cooking up and down the land. Delia, we salute you!
Will you miss Delia? Or do you think the time is right for her to hang up her TV apron? Let us know in the Comments section below.
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