My Food Hero: Tim Hayward meets Len Deighton
The Food Programme
BBC
4.4 • 976 Ratings
🗓️ 11 August 2015
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Tim Hayward meets the man who changed the whole way he approached food. Someone who inspired Tim, and many others, to look at food and the techniques of cooking in a completely new way.
A surprising food figure perhaps, he is a best-selling author, writer of "The IPCRESS File", creator of Harry Palmer (played by Michael Caine). He is also an illustrator, and pioneering food writer. He rarely gives interviews. He is Len Deighton.
Leonard Cyril Deighton - now 86 - has had a fascinating life - and as he explains, food has always been at its heart. His vivid and extraordinary story takes in post-war London with double agents and off-ration cooking, to a newly opened-up world of international air travel, and into the swinging sixties.
Len Deighton created the totally unique "cookstrips", fusing his skills at illustrating and writing with his cooking knowledge. For a young Tim Hayward, once he had seen these things would never be the same again.
Photograph by David Rose.
Presented by Tim Hayward Produced by Rich Ward and Dan Saladino.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hello I'm Sheila Dylan and welcome to this BBC download of the Food Program. |
| 0:06.0 | For information on the BBC's terms and conditions of use, visit |
| 0:09.6 | www. |
| 0:10.9 | BBC.co. UK slash Radio 4. www At that time people were very strange about men cooking and had to push a little bit at that door I think. |
| 0:28.0 | This program is about my personal hero, a man who's had a huge impact on me as a cook and as a writer. |
| 0:34.0 | He's perhaps a surprising food figure. |
| 0:37.0 | You might well know him as a writer of some of the most famous and popular fiction. |
| 0:41.0 | You might even know him as a world-class illustrator or a respected military |
| 0:44.2 | historian. But for me, Len Dayton is all about the food. |
| 0:51.2 | If one understands the process of cooking the way in which food is changed by cooking and so on, |
| 0:58.0 | you don't need recipes because it will all make sense to you. |
| 1:03.0 | You might never have heard Dayton's name. |
| 1:05.0 | You may be a long-time admirer, |
| 1:07.0 | or he could just be a name on your dad's bookshelf, |
| 1:10.0 | but listen on, because I reckon he made a real difference |
| 1:12.0 | in the world of food that still felt today. |
| 1:15.6 | To many of us, writers and cooks, his phenomenal food career has been overshadowed by his worldwide |
| 1:20.7 | success as a fiction writer. Yet in the brief time he blessed the |
| 1:24.2 | food world with his presence. He shook up the entrenched rolls of men and women |
| 1:28.0 | around food, stripped cooking of many of its class restrictions, and changed the |
| 1:31.9 | way we cook and eat forever. |
| 1:34.4 | It was one of the places where the Queen's cousin could sit next to some oick like me. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.