Rick Stein
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.3 • 14.3K Ratings
🗓️ 1 August 1999
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The castaway on this week's Desert Island Discs is Rick Stein.
When the police closed his discotheque down because of too many fights on a Saturday night, all he had left was his restaurant licence. Living by the sea, he took the obvious option and opened a fish restaurant. Today he is Britain's best sea food chef and a passionate advocate for the pleasures of cooking and eating fish. In conversation with Sue Lawley, he talks about his life and work and chooses eight records to take to the mythical island.
[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]
Favourite track: Concerto for Flute, Harp & Orchestra in C Major by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Book: Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy Luxury: Thai fish sauce
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. |
| 0:05.0 | For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music. |
| 0:08.0 | The program was originally broadcast in 1999, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a chef. 25 years ago he opened a restaurant in a small |
| 0:36.7 | cornish town because he'd failed to make a living doing anything else. Today it's |
| 0:41.2 | a temple to the art of cooking fish and people from all over the world |
| 0:44.8 | descend on it to taste its delicacies. Its owner has become a celebrity, popular on |
| 0:50.6 | television and selling his cookery books by the thousand. |
| 0:54.0 | Now after a public school education, Oxford University and this late blossoming career, |
| 0:59.0 | he says, |
| 1:00.0 | I felt so hopeless and useless as a youth but I've made a success. |
| 1:04.6 | There must be lots of other people like me. |
| 1:07.2 | He is Rick Stein. |
| 1:08.6 | I'm not sure there are a lot of other people like you Rick. |
| 1:12.2 | For the simple reason that what you discovered was that inside you |
| 1:16.0 | somewhere you had a natural talent for something, didn't you? |
| 1:19.2 | Yeah, I did, I suppose. |
| 1:22.2 | It was a bit late in coming, but I did begin to realize that I could cook. |
| 1:27.0 | And I do now think that cooks are born not made, really good cooks. |
| 1:32.0 | It's something... Do you? what is it then what is it |
| 1:34.4 | that you've got that we haven't well I have I think it's enjoying giving |
| 1:41.6 | pleasure to other people and it's sort of living vicariously and the way I cook I'm always thinking would |
| 1:48.8 | they like that and putting myself in their position. And I think some cooks just cook a little bit |
... |
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