So I told my Tivo to start collecting Floyd Around the Med off of the Travel Channel, where british television presenter Kieth Floyd travels around, as he always does, doing his “sketches,” as he calls them, cooking local food, usually outdoors, this time in various countries around the Mediterranean Sea. In the particular episode I was watching, Kieth was in Athens, explaining that he’d be cooking in the kitchen of a restaurant, with the assistance of the normal cook who didn’t speak english, and that Floyd didn’t speak greek, but that they’d carry on somehow. So as Floyd is toiling away at his pan-roasted whole snapper, or whatever it was, the greek cook was standing behind him, watching what he did.
And then it struck me … why should are they showing me Floyd swaggering around in this kitchen, pretending to cook the local cuisine, when they had a guy right there who knew the local cuisine inside and out, who the camera was pretty much completely ignoring? What’s the point of watching this guy stand in the middle of some field cooking, the gas jets of his cooking apparatus so loud, you can barely hear him? And he’s been doing this since at least the early 80’s, from what I can tell. It’s completely unfathomable.
