Billy Elliot author to make film about TV chef Nigel Slater

Mar 12 2010 The Journal

“I cook all the meals in our house. I don’t do fancy. I prefer simple food – I suppose very much in Nigel’s philosophy.

“My new favourite is a shoulder of pork slow-cooked in milk, but mostly I cook fish. I poach salmon in Pernod for a real treat!”

Lee added that because the film would focus on Nigel Slater as a child, the main actor would also be a child and therefore probably unknown.

Ruby co-founder Paul Trijbits told Broadcast magazine: “This is the Billy Elliot of the kitchen. It’s about ambition in the face of huge hindrances. Slater is iconic – he represents a lot of things we love about Britain.” The exact timing of transmission of the show is not yet known.

Nigel Slater is quoted on Waitrose’s website recalling: “My mother died when I was nine. My father, an engineer, who was very strict and Victorian, fell in love with our cleaner, and they ran away to the country from Wolverhampton.

“We moved to a cottage on the Worcestershire and Herefordshire border, roses and honeysuckle round the door, but it was in the middle of nowhere, and I didn’t see anyone from one day to the next.”

Slater’s award-winning autobiography, Toast: The Story of a Boy’s Hunger, was published in 2004.

Lee Hall has written about food – and sexuality – before. His stage musical Cooking with Elvis, a dark comedy which opened at Newcastle’s Live Theatre and was later produced in the West End, features an anorexic, a teenager obsessed with cookery books and a baker. In a madcap climax a tortoise gets baked in a pie.