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Hello and welcome to Table Talk, the Spectators' Food and Drink Podcast.

I'm Laura Pindigast.

And I'm Olivia Potts.

Today we're delighted to be joined by Charlie Biggham.

Charlie is the founder of Charlie Biggams, the food company he founded 25 years ago, which is now a household name.

I'm sure many of our listeners will be familiar with his very high quality ready meals.

Charlie, welcome to table talk.

Thank you very much.

Have very nice to join you, Lara and Olivia.

Charlie, we're going to start where we always do at the beginning and ask you, what are your earliest memories of food?

Bad, I think.

I think my earliest memories of food are truly revolting school food at my prep school, which we were made to eat. We had to, we had to finish, we had to finish our, you know, we had to finish our plate. We went to learn to leave anything, however rank and disgusting the food was, and it was invariably rank and disgusting. So, yeah, maybe what I've done for the last 27 years is try and, you know,

recover from that scarring early experience.

And when you weren't at school, what were mealtimes like at home?

Well, I think, you know, I was, I was, I guess we're going all the way back to the 1970s.

And I think sometimes we forget how lucky we are today.

Because food in, in 1970s, Britishon was fairly old fashioned and unexciting.

And, you know, certainly compared to today.

...