132,588
edits
Changes
Ilkley Literature Festival 2011 (view source)
Revision as of 12:27, 20 October 2011
, 12:27, 20 October 2011no edit summary
I'll confess that I'd been spoiled by Chris Mullin a few nights earlier. He carried the show entirely on his own. Hugh had Ruth Pitt with him to ask the pre-scripted questions – and she forgot her bag of props. Cue loud requests to a stage hand to go and get it for her for without it I fear that quite a lot of Hugh's presentation would have fallen flat. Rarely have we been so glad to see a swede, an aubergine and a mushroom. Hugh was so glad to see the bunch of (organic) carrots that he started eating them.
It was a partisan audience prepared to cheer Hugh for drinking a bottle of Yorkshire beer and who didn't even object when he confessed to having no suggestions for the lady who wondered what she could do with the giant marrow she'd acquired – or when he read a page and a half from his new book. If you've absorbed much any of the publicity for the book and the television series then you won't have found much that was new in the event but in much the same way that there's a world of difference between going to a football match and watching it on TV there's a great deal to be said for the charisma of the man himself and it was this that made the event a success.
There was no doubting the depth of feeling about animal welfare or the squandering of fish stocks and I was relieved to hear that he has no intention of becoming a vegetarian. His loss of weight (or ''getting in shape'') was a conscious decision prior to the filming of the television series and not a result of the fact that he ate no flesh in the course of the filming. He's reverted to being carnivorous since the end of filming – tempted first of all by mackerel.