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Larger Than Life


Clarissa Dickson Wright is best known for her role as one of tv's Two Fat Ladies. But there's more to her than meets the eye, says Matthew Fort.

Clarissa Dickson Wright is a woman of many facets. There's Clarissa the Fat Lady, swapping jokes, anecdotes and cookery tips with Jennifer Paterson. There's Clarissa, the food historian, scholar, archivist, bookshop owner. There's Clarissa, the campaigner for the Countryside Alliance, a doughty figure in a three-quarter-length Barbour, stomping along with stout walking stick in hand. There's Clarissa, the former barrister and rector of Aberdeen University, taking to the streets to protest with students against tuition fees. And there's Clarissa, the friend, generous with her time, her energy, her boundless knowledge.

Clarissa first hurtled into public view and affection in the late Jennifer Paterson's sidecar in the first series of Two Fat Ladies in 1996. They were halfway through filming the fourth series when Jennifer suddenly died, ending a remarkable double act.

There is a theory - I am not sure whether it is really correct or not - that Two Fat Ladies was commissioned by the clever clogs at bbc2 as a parody of Delia Smith. They were doing a lot of that kind of thing at the time: Mrs Merton and Alan Partridge parodying chat shows; Shooting Stars taking off quiz shows; and so on. So Two Fat Ladies was born, concept tv at its most inspired.

There were surely those who enjoyed the show for its post-modern irony, but many of us embraced Clarissa and Jennifer because they were like us. They weren't lean, chic, chattering chicks. They knew what they were talking about. They loved what they were doing. We identified with what Clarissa refers to as their 'sisterly banter'. We loved their non-pc recipes, laden with cream and butter. We saw them as our companions as they put-putted here and there, evidently having such fun.

I had taken Clarissa to my bosom some time before she made it onto our tv screens, when she was the presiding spirit at Books for Cooks in London's Notting Hill. She clearly knew as much about food, cooking and its place in our history and society as the books she sold. Ask her a question, no matter how abstruse, and back comes not just the answer, but answers to the questions that the answer itself generates, and they aren't always what you expected. She has a great habit of lobbing bits of information - about livestock at sea in the days of sail or recipes for cannabis fudge - like hand-grenades into the conversation. She acts like yeast in a bread dough, leavening the lumpen mass of received wisdom, and has a streak of anarchism that stirs her to march in defense of the countryside and her beloved students. She is an unbridled soul, with formidable intellectual firepower, developed in her previous incarnation as a barrister.

Although the series they were filming was to be the last with Jennifer Patterson, Clarissa misses her co-star. Firm friends though they had become, they did not know each other before the filming of the first series began. They knew of each other, had, in fact, met once, but had never really exchanged views. "We had two hours together on the second day of filming the pilot," says Clarissa, "when we really talked for the first time. We discovered that we had a great deal of shared mythology - Scottish connections, Roman Catholicism, convent education, songs." Ah, those songs.

Life has not been quiet for her since Two Fat Ladies. She has promoted three books at once: the Two Fat Ladies' Obsessions, Hieland Foodie, and Food - What We Eat and How We Eat It. This last, she says, she has been "putting together for 52 years". It is a kind of civilised gastronomic and culinary commonplace book that reflects the breadth of her knowledge and the uncircumscribed nature of her curiousity.

But that hasn't been all. She developed a taste for tv while making the Two Fat Ladies programmes. But not for the perfomance side of things, you understand. "I am fascinated by the technicalities of direction and production," she confesses. Indeed, she's always been fascinated by how things work. "When I was a barrister," she explains, "I was involved in a case about radiators. I became gripped by the mechanics of bending metal. Everyone else was bored to tears, but I kept on saying 'Did you know how they do that?' It's the same with tv. Jennifer never knew which camera was filming where. She wasn't interested in that kind of thing. But I was."

And now she's thinking about a new television series. Pressed to reveal what it will be about, she won't tell me. So, I'll wait and see. But I know one thing. It'll amuse, inform and make me think. And no matter what I conjecture, it'll be a surprise. She has a great habit of lobbing bits of information like hand-grenades into the conversation





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