Fear of Fanny

For those of us of a certain age, Fanny Craddock was an household name who seemed to polarise opinion in Britain as she emerged as the country’s first television chef. She (Julia Davis) was famed, along with her husband Johnnie (Mark Gatiss) and this attempts to take us through a chronology of her rise and fall. Right from the outset, though, this struggles to deliver. Though Davis herself delivers quite a solid performance, it doesn’t really bear much resemblance to the actual woman herself - and there is plenty of televised evidence that this is more of a dramatisation based around her career than any serious effort at presenting an authoritative biopic. Gatiss delivers well enough, but here again his persona seems more affected than the real life gent. She was a formidable and pioneering woman in real life, but here she seems more preposterous with her excesses - and yes, there were a few of those, exaggerated without us ever really feeling we are getting to know what made this woman tick. It also joins her life later in her career, so we never quite get to grips with just what contributed to her fairly phenomenal success in the first place as she tried to wean the masses away from spam, egg and chips towards something that might actually include something green and healthy. It’s lively enough and were it a drama about an entirely fictitious character, it might have fared better but with so much readily available on the real Fanny Craddock, this doesn’t really do her much justice.