Get Stuffed

(Advert in UK Television Trade Press)

As you can imagine, the “Get Stuffed” dirt was now in danger of shooting to television stardom. Word got to us that journalists were beginning to notice. Any girlie dirt with XX chromosomes would soon be getting featured on the inside pages of the tabloid press. (Determining the gender of the dirt in your kitchen is not easy).

This went on for about 12 episodes before ITV rang up the “Get Stuffed” production office to give us a good and proper bollocking. A face-to-face bollocking was demanded which meant that we were summoned to London - over 100 miles away.

After a few heavy days of preparation, the Mystery Chefs, in plain clothes, were duly despatched to London to eat humble pie and to forcibly explain that there was no way that the show’s production budget would stretch to allowing any of the “Get Stuffed” kitchens to be steam cleaned prior to filming. The Mystery Chefs had been ordered to wriggle, lie, and to be as devious as possible. At all costs, squeaky-clean kitchens on “Get Stuffed” were not a realistic proposition. Such kitchens only existed in the heads ofTV executives and in TV studios. Real life was different.

The Mystery Chefs chugged down to London in the Last-Ditch TV Allegro to meet the Big Cheese who controlled the ITV/business/money end of the series and jiggled the fate of “Get Stuffed” on the end of his little finger. This awesome guy had an office in a South Bank skyscraper. From his window, there was the £million panorama - from St. Paul's, across the City skyline, to the Houses of Parliament; with the Thames nestling far below. The Man was certainly not a man to be trifled with and he wasn’t a slacker when it came to fulfilling his job description.

He told them to find a solution to the filthy kitchen problem, “PDQ”! He scared both the poor Mystery Chefs senseless & shitless and gave them both very wobbly knees. The Big Cheese was a busy man of action so the meeting was soon over and he told the Chefs to “Scram”.

If you’re wondering how anyone could be so callous, you have to bear in mind that this was in the early 90s and before the “touchy-feely” aspect of the decade kicked in. In the 80s, kicking corporate ass was as popular as fox hunting and you’d get brownie points for making grown men blub. Vaporising idiots like the Mystery Chefs was all in a jolly morning’s work.

When the Mystery Chefs got out of the office, they had six major things to immediately execute in their very small and rather pathetic lives. In reverse order, these six priorities were:

6. Be heroes to the guys & gals back in the Last Ditch TV production office.
5. Find a solution to the “Get Stuffed” filthy kitchen problem.
4. Drive home, over 100 miles away, in a clapped out Austin Allegro.
3. Sober up.
2. Get drunk.
1. Totally evacuate everything that was in the lower parts of their intestinal tracts.

The Chefs fled the office and legged it about 5 metres into the ITV Executive Rest Room - which was a minimalist triumph of antiseptic interior design and hygiene. (For readers working in the UK TV industry who don’t believe that such luxury exists, we’re half way up the South Bank, TV Centre Tower - where the oiks never go).

1. They began to mock and deride the whole concept of Executive Bogs.

2. They began to scorn those who use them - people so anally retentive that they cannot “go” with the rest of humanity. Blah, Blah. Ha, Ha.

3. They began to have a good dekko to see if there was anything worth nicking. 

But, a minimalist environment rarely offers good opportunities for petty larceny. The only interesting and unusual thing in the room was a big notice on the wall, with red letters on a white background, which read, “Now Wash Your Hands”. Unfortunately this notice was screwed down.

Yo Bonza! And, oh my ... you really have to admire The Mystery Chefs - when the chips are down, they certainly know how to pull off some cunning stunts ...

... because, no other TV cookery show was actually telling people to be hygienic. By regularly repeating a “Wash yer Handies” message, in every single episode, not only would “Get Stuffed” be the squeakiest & cleanest TV show on the box but it would also positively promote personal hygiene. What’s more, every time the Big Cheese took a leak, the message would be re-inforced with the person who was most crucial to the show’s survival. Sweet Jesus, the Mystery Chefs would be hailed as geniuses.

And that’s it. Since then, the rest of the Last Ditch TV production team have done some proper research and realised that it is a very good idea to wash your handies whenever you prepare food.

Because ...

We certainly don’t want to eat anything that anyone’s cooked, post-pee (or post-poo) if they haven’t washed their handies.

We’ve all been violently ill a few times and, looking back, it seems very probable that kitchen hygiene was the cause.

Sorry if the end of this story seems to have taken a bit of a Radio Four-y, moralising tone but we recently heard that the average bog seat harboured fewer germs than the average kitchen chopping board.

So, thanks to the Mystery Chefs, all “Get Stuffed” viewers know to wash their handies and disinfect those bits of their kitchens where meat and fish are chopped up. And always keep food properly covered if it’s stored in the fridge.

Every single day, when you are not ill through food poisoning or kitchen hygiene - you can bless the Mystery Chefs for your own wonderful good health.