My screenshot is in focus, but the picture is not.
After all the anticipation, the Blu-ray has finally arrived...
Drumming, tribal or jazzy in rhythm, begins as “Vincent Price Presents” appears in a red Futura Display font on a black screen. Cut to a steaming pot on a stove, the word “Cooking” appearing over it in the same font and colour. Expectations already countered, “Price-Wise” appears in fanciful hand-cut lettering, still red, in a yellow burst on a blue background. With expectations placed on his name having been broken, and after today’s potato-based menu is shown, the man himself appears on screen, wearing an apron over his own clothes: “Hello, I’m Vincent Price. in this series of programmes, I hope to take you around the world using your cooker instead of a jet plane.”
So begins the first episode of the six-part “Cooking Price-Wise” series, the same opening recreated each time with variations in pot use and font size. Each of the six episodes is delineated by both the main ingredient and where the recipes come from, the UK lining up with bacon.
Everything feels slightly wobbly, and slightly giddy: Price is perfectly in command of his subject and each episode’s running order, the recipes having been gathered personally during his travels, his enthusiasm and curiosity fully on display, with a “hmm?” capping sentences after making certain points.
Everything may be in place to ensure that pre-prepared food is ready at the right point to continue the demonstration – Price refers to “the marvels of modern television” several times – but I don’t feel a final script was used, or indeed needed, for example when an Ayrshire roll was instructed as being cooked “at 370 degrees, or mark 4 in gas”.
The show itself feels it was recorded in a hurry, and in one continuous take: a zooming in on Price as he introduces one episode’s main ingredient leads to the shot going out of focus, and the shadows of people behind the camera are occasionally seen. These flaws were either not important – having been broadcast in April 1971, many might still be watching in black and white, on older 405-line sets, making them less visible – or that time was constantly against the production, the entire series having been recorded over the course of a week in July 1970, with two episodes completed on the Friday.
It turns out the pastry dish I couldn’t remember from last time was “Fish Fillets Nord Zee”, which instead uses mashed potato and a cake icing bag to create a border and compartments on a dish, to tell the story of Dutch history through its dykes and sea walls, with the fish and vegetables representing the sea and land. I still won’t be trying it, but I enjoyed hearing Price talking about it. At the time, chefs were more willing to give up the recipes and secrets featured in this series, something that would be more closely guarded as “intellectual property” today. There was a garlic salad that sounded rather interesting...
Some curious decisions are made in the presentation: an episode centred around bacon refers to a cross-section model of a pig balanced on a kitchen cabinet above Price’s head, and the history of potatoes are illustrated with cartoons by an uncredited artist. The most bizarre moment of all was the creation of a fruit cocktail crocodile, using a cucumber as a starting point - the lights dim to make the “monster”, and the close-up of the face was simultaneously terrifying and hilarious.
The kitchen is incredibly 1970s in look, with patterned cookware, woodgrain cabinets and red kitchen tops. At the same time, it is a modern kitchen: among the uses of a blender, garlic press and the fridge as cooking gadgets, a dishwasher resides in the back of the shot, never mentioned. A ledge in front of the kitchen tops is reserved for the end of each episode for Price to point out, with a wooden spoon, the ingredients used in each episode, in case you were too slow writing them down - later in the 1970s and into the 80s, teletext and home video made taking notes far easier, let alone the tie-in book.
The series is intimate, with no audience, Price talking directly to the viewer, both he and the kitchen backed into a corner by the cameras. It is almost a YouTube video circa 1970: it is made by an independent production company, I.D. TV, and the show is copyright of the Vincent Price estate. It was filmed using Thames Television facilities, but was at its mercy as to when it would be broadcast, just as anyone uploading a video online is subject to the rules and regulations of the host site. Even YouTubers now have more capable and portable cameras, with image stabilisation, and perhaps even the luxury of reshoots, but the same time, a YouTube video would more likely cut out any hesitation, and break each episode into one video per recipe.
Shot today, “Cooking Price-Wise” would undoubtedly have a much larger budget, while also sending Vincent Price back to the places from where he found those recipes, making it as much a travelogue as an instructional cooking show – think Keith Floyd or Rick Stein. However, that would sacrifice the intimacy of one person enthusiastically sharing the knowledge they have gathered, which was my main takeaway from a TV show I have waited years to see.
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