Creating and Routinizing Style and Immediacy: Keith Floyd and the South-West English Roots of New Cookery Mediatizations

This chapter discusses food mediatisation issues through considering the case of Keith Floyd, English TV cookery presenter of the 1980s/1990s. Floyd, along with his producer David Pritchard, created a highly original form of TV presentation and became a world-famous media chef in the process. His TV persona was built upon performance of immediacy and spontaneity, through which a high level of authenticity was communicated to audiences. His on-screen persona also encompassed an ambivalent presentation of masculinity, expressed in flamboyant clothing choices. The local conditions of TV production in South-West England strongly shaped the idiosyncratic style of filming in his early series. The tropes of spontaneity developed in those series later came to be widely imitated by other presenters and producers. But such tropes also came to imprison Floyd during his later series, which exhibit strong tendencies towards the routinisation of spontaneity.