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My Greek Kitchen

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  • Posted at 12:57pm
  • 23 November 2007
  • by RhodriMarsden-RT

While those of us who don't class ourselves as eye-candy have probably tearfully given up on the idea of television presenting, there's still a way in. Become a TV chef. You don't have to be beautiful. Fans of Antony Worrall Thompson are unlikely to have posters of him on their bedroom walls. I'm not privy to the contents of Clarissa Dickson Wright's postbag, but I'm guessing that lustful notelets from potential suitors are pretty thin on the ground.

In fact, I have a theory that the uglier or more overweight the TV chef, the more we implicitly trust their opinions. "They must know what they're talking about," I ponder, "because there's certainly no other reason for getting them on the telly."

When a dowdy Nigella Lawson used to be a guest on Nigel Slater's television programmes about ten years ago, her recipes for grilled mushrooms would carry great weight and untold significance. Today, now they've completed her transformation into a pouting starlet, I can't take her seriously.

Which brings us to My Greek Kitchen, presented by an impossibly beautiful British Greek Cypriot called Tonia Buxton. On her website, she describes herself as an author, historian, cook, athlete and television presenter.

The woman is clearly a superhero. Her capabilities know no bounds. She is clearly not of this world. At the same time, for all I know, she might be a living nightmare to spend time with. She might involuntarily begin projectile vomiting when she gets upset, for example. But going by My Greek Kitchen, she's the pinnacle of human perfection.

As for my theory above, well, I don't particularly care about what she's cooking, because I'm too busy staring at the almost filthy way she massages a spicy marinade into raw pork fillets.

At one point on Wednesday night's show, she introduced us to her husband, at which point any male viewers will have emitted a hilarious groan of disappointment as their elaborately constructed fantasy of cavorting on a Cypriot beach with Ms Buxton evaporated into the ether.

Oh, but hang on a minute. Their conversations are stilted and devoid of affection! Oh, thank you, God! She doesn't really like him! There's still hope to cling to. Along with a recipe for a black-eyed pea and marrow stew.

This isn't her first foray into food-related TV. She used to co-present a programme called Beauty and the Feast, alongside an equally beautiful doctor called Simone Lester. They would invite three men who had a particular occupation - and this could be rugby players, accountants, mechanics, firefighters - to come over to what was notionally "their house", cook them a meal, and subject them to beauty treatments.

It was a terrible premise for a show, and executed in the most toe-curling fashion imaginable. It was awful. But it didn't matter. Because Tonia Buxton was on it.

This has all probably marked me out as supremely shallow, and I suppose it's possible that you'd like to hear more about My Greek Kitchen instead of me going all moon-eyed over some woman. Well, there's not a lot else to say. She cooks a few Greek dishes and, like all TV chefs, she says "literally" a lot.

"Then you literally add two tablespoons of crème fraîche," she might say. As opposed, presumably, to all the other secret hidden meanings behind "adding two tablespoons of crème fraîche". Indeed, the use of "literally" has become so endemic among TV chefs, that if they don't say it while reciting their recipes, you wonder what on earth you're supposed to do next.

Anyway, I will now literally post this blog.

My Greek Kitchen is on Discovery Travel & Living (Sky 276).

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