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How the Hairy Bikers lost a load of weight – and their USP | Television & radio


If you were to define the TV chefs in one word – Jamie: pukka; Gordon: angry; Delia: mumsy; Hugh: posh; Nigella: saucy; Heston: bonkers; Floyd: pickled – you would define the Hairy Bikers as jolly. Their concept is simple. They are hairy (Si King, 53, sports the bushier face-fuzz; Dave Myers, 62, is more coiffured). They ride big, angry motorcycles. They are northern (King is from County Durham, Myers from Cumbria). They are lovable in a larky, Ant & Dec way, and not frightening in an about-to-get-kneecapped-with-a-pool-cue-for-asking-to-use-the-toilets-in-a-strictly-bikers-only-pub, Sons of Anarchy way. And they like their grub. Boy, do they like their grub. Best served by the trough-full and as physically close to a park as possible.

The HBs first appeared on our screens in 2004 in The Hairy Bikers’ Cookbook, where Si and Dave two-wheeled around the world, only stopping to stuff their faces with whatever the local cuisine had to offer. Nothing was off-menu, from crocodile satay in Namibia to goat penis in Vietnam (yum). The boys lapped it up. If they’d run it over, they’d probably have had it for lunch in a baguette. The Hairy Bikers’ Food Tour of Britain saw them scoff their way from Land’s End to John O’ Groats, pitting their culinary skills against local chefs, and rustling up Lincolnshire plum breads, Norfolk dumplings and Welsh black beef wellingtons. In Best of British, the duo crammed their cakeholes with the history behind traditional British cuisine, from steak and kidney puddings to faggots and spotted dick. In Mums Know Best, they – ding-dong! – gatecrashed families trying to eat their tea to half-inch mothers’ top-secret recipes for paella, pavlova and mulligatawny soup.

Their recipes such as Shropshire Fidget and Sultan’s Delight may have sounded more like definitions from Roger Mellie’s Profanisaurus than food. On a difficulty rating of Ainsley to Heston, the Bikers happily sit around the Tim Lovejoy mark, ie about the level of your mate who’s much better at cooking than you. Then, in August 2012, all hell broke loose. After one too many mud pies in Mississippi Adventure they returned in Hairy Dieters: How to Love Food and Lose Weight. Laudably, King ’n’ Myers shifted 2½st each in three months. But, more boringly, they decided wang on about it. So it was out with the motorbikes and in with the pedal cycles and new entries to the Hairybiketionary like (gasp) HEALTHY sweet and sour chicken, (yikes) LOW FAT beef and potato pie and (gulp) SKINNY lemon cupcakes. Alas, the jolly TV chefs just weren’t as jolly any more.

Half travelogue, half cookery programme, the show’s appeal had always been in watching Myers work his fingers through a bowl of 94% fat suet and King getting bits of battenberg stuck in his beard. The lads have kept the weight off through Hairy Bikers’ Asian Adventure, Mediterranean Adventure and Route 66, but watching them politely turn down that third chocolate brownie isn’t the same. “If music be the food of love, play on,” wrote Shakespeare. What Shakespeare doesn’t mention is that dieting can turn you into an eternal bore.



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