Galloping Gourmet

The 1960s had Julia Child as its emblematic television cook, and the early 1970s had Graham Kerr. "The Galloping Gourmet" was the first cooking show to aggressively capitalize on the entertainment potential of the medium and to come at the genre from this angle.

It would be easy to say that Kerr leapt on Childs' coattails. After all, "The Galloping Gourmet" appeared on U.S. television in 1969, six years after "The French Chef." But it would be glib and plain wrong to say so. Not only had Graham Kerr been cooking since he was a wee one in the English hotel kitchens owned by his parents compared to Julia who began at a doddering 36, but his first televised cooking demo aired back in 1960 in New Zealand ("That doesn't count," Child teased him). True enough, Child was a pioneer in the United States and unquestionably deserves her iconic status as queen of small screen cuisine, but Kerr set a few firsts himself.

Viewers in the U.S. had been well prepped, of course, by "The French Chef," but the style of "The Galloping Gourmet" was a world apart. The show opened with the snappily-dressed, British dandy of a ball of energy leaping over a tall kitchen chair while holding a full glass of wine, setting the tone for the rest of the episode and raising the bar for almost every cooking show that followed.

Where Child's studio was quiet except for the splat of, say, a sole filet hitting a hot skillet, cracking of chicken bones or her pleasant chirruping, Kerr's set was home to the first in-studio audience for a syndicated cooking program and the first to have a "hidden camera" trained on the audience. "We could go into the people's faces as they were licking their lips and going 'mmmm'," says Kerr's producer-wife Treena. No minor convention that - consider where Emeril would be without his conditioned oohing-and-aahing audience.

As home cooks on the whole became more self-possessed in their kitchens and dining rooms, cooking shows were ostensibly relieved of some of the burden of actual teaching. Kerr heeded the how-to format to a good degree, demonstrating cooking techniques with recipes for dishes like Shoulder of Lamb Wellington, Veiled Country Lass (Danish applesauce cake), spaghetti con salsa di vognole and Hot Cracker Crab, but unlike his predecessors, teaching was not the primary rationale. Graham - or more accurately, Treena - thought of his major occupation as comedian.

"'The Galloping Gourmet' is a new phenomenon on TV," wrote Margaret Ness in the Christian Science Monitor in 1969, "a cooking entertainer." Imagine - there was a time not so long ago when cooking shows were neither mandated nor expected to amuse. Variety shows, like cooking shows, were older than the medium of TV itself. Injected with 1970s inventiveness and irreverence, the form continued to hold our attention for the entire decade from "Laugh-In" and "Carol Burnett" to "Sonny and Cher," "Donny and Marie" and the indelible "Saturday Night Live." Rather than a drama and plot to keep us glued to the set, the variety show was a mindless, indulgent entertainment format cut into small, bite-size chunks that hooked us. It was ideal for boomers trying to combat any sobriety - just as it had always intended - brought on by hostages, terrorism or stagflation. Kerr's spectacle fit this model, too. Each moment held the chance for the unexpected, and whatever ensued would dependably be good for a laugh.

"Inevitably you get someone who does something unique," says Kerr obliquely and ever-humbly referring to "The Galloping Gourmet" as such a maverick. "In order to get noticed and come up through the pack, like Emeril did, you have to somehow have something, a slant, or a word or two, a defined persona in order to make it within the genre. It's like Liberace with his clothes and the candelabra."

Emeril Lagasse's "Bam!" and madcap habit of adding umpteen extra garlic cloves as an afterthought are well known among Food Network devotees and perhaps anyone with functional ears and eyes. In the days before TV hit the viewing audience repeatedly with blunt, high-concept ideas, Kerr's trademark was simply his comedic persona. Whereas Julia won untold numbers of fans despite, as her biographer writes, her being "'all wrong' for television," Kerr was endowed with a made-for-TV personality. The show's title presumably referred to his recipe-hunting visits to various countries shown in taped segments (another convention now taken for granted). But it's fair to say he also galloped about the studio kitchen, flirting, hamming and performing a veritable slapstick routine. In a half hour show, he'd take off his suit jacket to cook and gallop then replace it when the time came to dine by candlelight and classical music. He once cooked in a suit of armor and another time in boxer shorts and swim flippers.

Kerr often addressed the audience as a single companion referring to her as "darling" and "sweetheart." Compared in physicality to both Dick Van Dyke and Gary Cooper, Kerr was both goofy and handsome. Traditionally manly and virile, he was not. This, however, did not detract from his attractiveness, as scores of blushing female fans have suggested. I recall having a bit of a secret May-December crush on him myself (TV is a powerful beast, especially when sitting mere inches from its electrically crackling screen). In fact, his metrosexuality - a term yet to be coined but fully embodied in his being - was an essential part of his charm. As Joan Bowling from Santa Monica, California wrote to the Los Angeles Times in 1969, "This program is a delight. Graham Kerr is witty, gay, light as one of his own soufflés and a trifle bawdy""