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Dear Gary

It feels a bit weird calling you Gary; I still think of you as The Cockatiel, an affectionate family nickname inspired by your trademark spiky hair, which seemed thrillingly exotic when it first popped up on TV in the late 1980s. How delighted you looked to hear the legendary French chef Albert Roux admit, “When I first met you, the hairdo that you had, I thought, he’ll never make a good chef this one. But how wrong I was!” That was during your rather premature episode of This is Your Life a decade later.

For my part, I was only six, so I hope you wouldn’t have minded – your excitable presence on screen captured my childish imagination. You made food look like fun; as Prue Leith put it, you were perhaps the first rock star of cooking, your infectious enthusiasm the antithesis of moody contemporaries like Marco Pierre White.

I was delighted to find your twinkly eyes on the bag of sugar in the cupboard; how I badgered my mum to make the gloriously sticky syrup sponges and treacle tarts you dangled so temptingly in front of my face as part of your campaign with Tate and Lyle. Sadly, however, I had to wait until I had a kitchen of my own to taste them as my mum’s idea of a pudding was, and remains, a fruit salad.