Jamie Oliver Q&A

Features

The celebrity chef talks to RT about his series Jamie at Home, which extols the virtues of fresh, home-grown food.

RT: What's it like working from home?

JO: It was great being able to get up every morning and go straight to work. Some of the crew stayed here, the rest stayed at my dad's pub down the road. I thought Dad would do me a deal, but when he quoted the price, it was the standard rate. When I complained, he just said, "What's your problem? I've given you ten per cent off one of the rooms!"

Apparently you've got a kitchen in your shed?

I've got four kitchens in all. The one in which we did the most filming is probably the crappiest I've ever had. It's half garden shed, really, right next to the greenhouse and perfect for bottling pickles and making jam. Plus I've got about ten different places in the garden where I like to cook: I've got a barbecue, a wood-fired oven - even holes in the ground!

Do you actually like gardening or is it just put on for the cameras?

Absolutely not. For me, the great thing about gardening is that basically you just put the seeds in the ground and eventually they come up as vegetables, unless you've done something wrong.

Though of course I did have lots of help from Brian, my gardener, who you will see in the series, and who is one of the nicest, most placid people I've ever met, but who has now left and gone off to live in Suffolk, I'm sorry to say. Originally we weren't going to have him in the series, but it would have been daft not to, wouldn't it?

Are you turning veggie?

No way am I a veggie, but I guess I do eat in an Italian sort of way, which is to have three or four meals a week which happen not to have any meat. That's quite easy, really, when you've got all those brilliant Italian soups, risottos, pasta, antipastos and salads. And the great thing is that because Italians don't insist, like us, on having a big, expensive chunk of meat with every other meal, they can all eat cheaply and well.

The programme's called Jamie at Home - so where are the kids?

It was tempting to put them on camera, but it's not right, is it? I mean, when they were born, they were papped [photographed by the paparazzi] all over the place.

But since then, I've tried to be a bit protective, and most of the papers and magazines are actually very good and blur their faces if they print pictures, which I really appreciate. If I then go and shove them in my TV series, it gives out the wrong message, doesn't it? They need to have their own lives, not mine.

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