While Fanny Cradock cut a controversial figure – berating Margaret Thatcher for wearing ‘cheap shoes and clothes’, writing off Eamonn Andrews as a ‘blundering amateur’ and famously being forced to apologise for insulting a housewife cook on The Big Time – her cookery programmes were enormously popular.

Dressed in evening gown, drop earrings and pearls, donning thick make-up, she boomed orders to her partner Johnnie, a gentle, monocled stooge who was portrayed as an amiable drunk. The programmes were watched by millions and were hugely influential: the Queen Mother told Fanny that she and Johnnie were ‘mainly responsible’ for the improvement in catering standards since the war; Keith Floyd declared that ‘she changed the whole nation’s cooking attitudes’; for Esther Rantzen ‘she created the cult of the TV chef’.

Lavishly illustrated and illuminated by amusing facts and anecdotes, Fabulous Fanny Cradock paints a fun, entertaining portrait of this extraordinary woman.

CLIVE ELLIS is a freelance journalist who writes regularly for the Daily Telegraph. His first book, C.B. The Life of Charles Burgess Fry, won the Cricket Society's Silver Jubilee Literary Award. He lives in Greenwich.