INTERVIEW
Back to her roots
As she launches her first cookbook and prepares to turn 60, Great British Menu host Andi Oliver talks about battling an eating disorder, recovering from a recent hysterectomy and why she's getting bored with having a bald head
by SARAH OLIVER
Andi Oliver is in one of her trademark frocks. Today's dress is a hot, bright coral accessorised, as ever, with a huge pair of cat-eye glasses that she perches on her newly shaven head. She is also, rather unexpectedly, wearing a blue sling because the TV chef has just fallen down a flight of stairs and had surgery to repair a tendon in her shoulder.
'Getting old is not for sissies,' she sighs, 'but what's the alternative? It's not a good one. I'm always amazed to have survived another year . .' And then she starts to laugh because, right now, in the run-up to her 60th birthday ('my jubilee as I like to think of it'), she is having the time of her life.
The presenter of BBC Two's Great British Menu and a contributing chef on BBC One's Saturday Kitchen, Andi also presents foodie programmes for Channel 4 and serves up a side order of literature on Sky Arts' Book Club Live. Earlier this year, she and her daughter Miquita Oliver went in search of their Caribbean heritage for a critically acclaimed BBC Two two-parter The Caribbean with Andi and Miquita, and now she is publishing her first ever cookbook, The Pepperpot Diaries.