30 Aug 2024
It’s become a British institution. What better way to start a lazy weekend than sticking on Saturday Kitchen after breakfast, watching Matt Tebbutt banter with celebrity guests while whipping up a culinary feast ahead of the latest omelette challenge.
With the show off-air over the summer, Matt has been taking a break at home in Wales, where he has lived since he was a baby, having been born just down the road from us in High Wycombe.
“I’m just looking at the sun for a change. I was in Liverpool yesterday and it was just pouring down, so it was cold all day, but here we are and it’s much nicer today.”
We’re on Zoom talking about St Albans Pub in the Park, where Matt has been a regular guest over the past few years, and is set to return for this year’s event from September 6-9.
But although it’s only a few weeks away, he’s yet to decide what dish he’ll be demonstrating on the chef’s stage, although he is looking forward to experimenting with some barbecue.
“It kind of depends on what the weather’s doing. At the moment I’m still in sort of holiday mode, so I haven’t written the recipe yet. I always tend to do seasonal stuff, so going into autumn I might do a bit of game. At this time of year I like to use pigeon, which is obviously much cheaper than grouse, so I might do a little game dish or something else that’s seasonally led.
“It’s about a 30 minute demonstration, and they’re quite rapid, quite punchy, which is not bad actually. I think I might be doing two different stages this year, as they have a barbecue stage and I’m quite into the barbecue thing right now.
“I got hold of a Monolith, it’s one of those egg-style barbecues. I never really got why everyone got excited about those in the past, but now I’ve got one I really do get why as they’re bloody good.
“It’s just a much more fun way of barbecuing because you’ve got the fire and the jeopardy of whether you burn something and it’s much more hands-on. Less clinical is probably the wrong word, but you know you could do a dish on an induction hob and it’s all very clean and polished, but on a barbecue it’s much more freewheeling, which I really enjoy.”
He’ll also be signing copies of his new book, appropriately called Matt Tebbutt’s Pub Food, and is looking forward to coming along, meeting fans and soaking up the atmosphere.
“Pub in the Park in general is really, really fun, and St Albans is no exception. People want to be there, they love the fact that there’s music and food combined. This year there’s Tini Tempah on Friday night, Olly Murs I think is Saturday, and it’s going to be a really, really fun thing to be at.
“Everyone’s out to have a good time, and the fact that you throw great quality food into the mix is terrific. I do lots and lots of these things all around the country, and sometimes you go to what they call a food festival and you look at the food and you go, ‘Really? That’s the best you’ve got?’
“The difference with Pub in the Park is they’re actual restaurants who are there to showcase what they do, so they’ve providing quality food. People love it, it’s a real notch up.”
Before Matt gets to enjoy himself in St Albans, he has to go to work, with an episode of Saturday Kitchen to do in the morning: “I’ll go along afterwards and just kick around and have a laugh really.”
But that means watching himself when it comes to sampling too much of the wine featured on the show: “I realised you can’t read words very well if you start drinking at a quarter past ten in the morning, so if I actually have more than a centimetre in a wine glass for the whole show I’d be surprised!”
On the Saturday evening in St Albans he’s joining Simon Rimmer for his live Pod in the Park podcast. When we spoke to Simon a few weeks ago he suggested Matt might have been too scared to take part in this unscripted and impromptu session…
Matt laughs: “I’m not scared of him! But he’s a very funny guy. I like him a lot. I did The Great British Menu many years ago, and it was my first foray into TV, so I actually phoned his restaurant, and he was so kind, so generous, and just told me what to expect. That was probably 20-something years ago and we’ve stayed friends ever since. He’s a lovely guy.”
Watching Matt juggle between cooking, interviewing and presenting on a weekly basis suggests a natural ability to multi-task. Put it this way, I’ve been interviewing people for 30 years and I wouldn’t like to do it while I was making a sandwich, let alone some of the remarkable dishes he prepares for his guests, but he makes it all look very easy.
“Well, that’s very kind. But it’s well-rehearsed, it’s well-practiced, there’s a fantastic production team behind it and so when you’re interviewing somebody you don’t choose a particularly difficult dish to do because otherwise you’re too busy concentrating on getting it right and not concentrating on what they’re actually saying.
“Very often you’ll see interviews on other shows and you can tell that the interviewer isn’t listening to what people are saying, so why bother doing it? The thing I have to control is that I get really kind of into chatting to whoever it is, and you want to ask the next question, but you’re running out of time and you’re being screamed at in your ear: ‘Tell us about the food!’ so it then becomes a juggling act.
“One of the classic examples is when I was chatting to Paloma Faith [who is also performing at Pub in the Park on the Sunday] and she was telling me about her new book and going on a particular angle about men and then I’m being told that I have to interrupt her.
“It’s like this is the very essence of what she is telling me that she can’t bear, so when you get to the moment like that, you just have to make it light and funny, and Paloma just said to me, ‘Well done, you’ve made a cake’!”
He reflects on some of his favourite guests over the years: “Barry Humphries was fantastic. He was a real old school comedian, very sharp. Tom Allen is very naturally gifted and fast. A lot of the comedians we have on are as sharp as tacks. If they weren’t comedians they’d be lawyers or doctors as they’re that kind of intelligent.
“Caitlin Moran, she’s brilliant, Gary Barlow… The best guests we have on are the ones who they’ve got nothing to prove, people who come on and are there to have fun, or the ones that actually sit at home and watch the show and they’re genuinely excited to be there. It’s really nice.
“Jack Savoretti is a lovely, lovely, very talented guy, annoyingly cool! There’s been a real diverse range of people we’ve had in. Danny Trejo from Hollywood fame, the gangster Mexican. We nearly had Dave Grohl, he would have been a lot of fun, but there were storms over the UK and his plane kept getting cancelled.
“So, yeah, there’s a real mix. One week you might have someone from Strictly, who a lot of people will get excited about, but the coolest ones, the ones who are going to be the most successful, are the ones who’ve got nothing to prove.”
One thing he obviously can’t rehearse are his handovers with BBC Breakfast host Naga Munchetty, which have become quite legendary for her attempts to catch him out.
“Yeah, that is probably the most nerve-wracking part of the whole hour and a half, because you just don’t know what angle she’s coming from. She enjoys it and I secretly enjoy it because it can just go anywhere and you really have to think fast but sometimes I just can’t come back with something.
“But it’s always fun. She’s very, very funny. I like her a lot. You can understand it because they’ve had many hours of reading very often sad, soul-destroying stories and then someone like me pops up and it’s a bit of light relief. So yeah, it’s nerve-wracking but really fun at the same time.”
The show has also spun off a series of specials called Celebration Kitchen, which celebrate different faiths through food, and so far have included episodes focusing on Yom Kippur, Vaisakhi, Eid, Passover, Holi and Diwali, going out live on the Sunday morning closest to the actual festival day.
“It’s a really nice thing to do actually, and it’s done in a really non-preachy way. I’ve done them over a few years now, but there’s things you forget, things you remember about different festivals, and it’s done in a way that’s really fun and joyous to learn about somebody’s culture through food.
“It’s almost a little bit anthropological. You look at the food, how it’s served, when they serve it, what they’re serving, and everything that goes around that. So although it is fundamentally a religious show, it’s done in a way that people go oh I love that, or I’d love to try that, or I’ve seen that before.
“You get very different people coming in and cooking, so it’s totally away from the norm. I like asking the questions, because I genuinely don’t know the answers, and therefore there’s a lot of people at home who also don’t know, so we kind of do it together. So that’s the best bit.”
Despite presenting Saturday Kitchen for almost a decade, he’s obviously happy to talk about the show, and his passion for presenting it is evident throughout our conversation.
“It’s just a joyous, fun show to make, and I think that comes across.
“A lot of people come up to me at these sort of festivals and say: ‘It makes my Saturday morning, it just lifts me up from whatever has been going on that week’.
“That was particularly noticeable during Covid when we continued doing the show. At first we didn’t know how to gauge the mood and whether to be a bit more serious, but ultimately it was an escape.
“We all wanted a bit of normality, a bit of an escape, so although it felt quite frivolous given the state the country was in, for an hour and a half it was a bit of normality.”
Tickets and further information about Pub in the Park St Albans are available from https://www.pubintheparkuk.com/st-albans
