`I said something about stripping food down to its bare essentials and from that the BBC came up with this name for a porno king . . . (The Naked Chef). I was so paranoid about the cheesy name that it became all the more important that the show was honest'
It's 10.30 in the morning and 24-year-old Jamie Oliver, aka BBC's "The Naked Chef", has been in Dublin for precisely 20 hours and is due back at work in London at 3 p.m. "Like a carrot in front of a donkey, innit?" he sighs, but looks slightly affronted when I suggest he must have missed out on the nightlife. "I just feel guilty I've only half done the job. I wish I'd met more of the booksellers and done some more signings," he says, looking genuinely unhappy.
This is surprising given that, for most writers, the grip-and-grin, meet-the-people part of the book-publishing process is the bit they are more than happy to miss. Not so Oliver, whose whistle-stop tour of Ireland is for the sole purpose of promoting his book, The Naked Chef, which is based on his weekly cookery series. "In London," he continues, "if I have to start work at 12, I'll leave an hour-and-a-half early and I'll go around on my scooter and sign all the stock in bookshops - you can get through an awful lot of bookshops in an hour-and-a-half. All the booksellers have my mobile number so they can ring me when they have more stock in."
He looks even more surprised when asked why he bothers, why he wants so badly for his book to sell? "I put a lot of work into the book and the TV series. I worked my arse off. It's hard to get to number one of the non-fiction charts and nobody was more surprised than me when I hit it. So now I'm working really hard to keep it there. Do you know what I'm up against? The Star Wars book, that's what." I point out that a lot of things have been knocked off their perches with the advent of Star Wars. "I haven't," he grins.
Jamie Oliver defines the phrase "larger than life". He came bursting onto our TV screens with The Naked Chef and immediately divided the camps between those who love his hands-on, cooking-for-friends approach and his "sarf" London commentary littered with "pukkas," "wickeds" and "lovely jubblys," and those who hate all that. He must be doing something right as the book has sold more than 80,000 copies and has spent over eight weeks on the best-seller lists.
Much of the criticism of the series has presumed that Jamie Oliver is a package dreamed up by the marketing department of a TV company, but in fact Oliver's credentials, both as a chef and as a bona fide, pukka wide boy, are perfectly respectable. His big break came when he was at work in the kitchen of the River Cafe in London, where he still works. "They were making this one-off documentary on the two ladies (proprietors Ruth Rogers and Rose Gray) and they just kept the cameras rolling - they were kind of annoying me actually. I was really busy and was cooking very fast, all this lovely colourful food, and I wasn't looking at them but I was giving it loads of lovely jubbly, like I do, you know? Anyway, the day after it was shown I got about five phone calls."
Unusually, he held out against a series for a long time, although he has always wanted to write a cookbook and started one about five years ago. "I didn't want someone else to put me across. They could make you look like a complete and utter cock." In the end, he wrote a proposal that set out exactly what he wanted the series to be like: "I had to be myself in it because I really can't act. I think that's the only reason it worked because, let's be honest, nobody needed another TV chef."
What about the people who don't like it? He looks nonplussed. "Nobody's really criticised it. Some people don't like the camerawork, which is really fluid and can be a bit jumpy, but can you imagine what it's like to work at that speed? I knew I could only do it if I was being myself and, if you do everything in five takes, it's impossible to get very excited, it really slows it down. That programme has a massively honest time-scale."
Still, he can fully understand people's reaction to the programme's title as he had more than a few reservations about it himself. "Some developer at the BBC came up with The Naked Chef. When I wrote my original proposal, the whole idea was `What does a 21-year-old chef cook at home?' I said something about stripping food down to its bare essentials and from those two words they came up with this name for a porno king . . . For me it's actually turned out to be a good thing because I was so paranoid about the cheesy name that it became all the more important that the show was honest and reflective of me."
He got what he wanted by "whingeing," he says. "The BBC would try and change it, saying there wasn't enough for older viewers and could I cook for older people. But that's rubbish because, first of all, I don't cook for old people so where's the reality in that? Secondly, how patronising is it to think that old people only want to watch old people on telly? Actually, the programme goes down really well with the over-65s - there's a whole mothering thing going on."
He describes how one "really old" woman came up to him in Leeds to say she really liked the programme, the food and "the lingo. She starts coming out with all this `pukka, wicked' stuff - can you imagine how weird that is coming out of this old lady from Sheffield?" Other fans he lists include a gang of eight-year-old boys and people of his own age, who feel they know his sister, his mates, his band and all the other people who come to tea on the programme.
Most of all, people like his youth, although Jamie Oliver has actually put in as many years in a kitchen as chefs twice his age. His parents run a pub/restaurant in north Essex and Jamie started working in the kitchen - "peeling and cleaning and stuff" - when he was eight. "That was where all the geezers were. I've always been a hands-on, practical person and I liked their style." A stint of work experience at 16, when he was put in charge of his own section within two weeks, convinced him that he wanted to cook for a living. After three years in Westminster College - "the best thing that ever happened to me" - he went to work for Antonio Carluccio in the Neal Street Restaurant. "On the last day of college, our teacher asked us all what we wanted to do and everybody was saying the Ritz or La Maison aux Quartres Saisons. So I said I wanted to make really good bread and pasta and everybody laughed. I was gutted, man, I thought it was a really good answer. Anyway, this Italian friend of mine said I should work for Carluccio."
At Neal Street, Oliver worked hard and ended up coming into the restaurant secretly at 3 a.m. to learn how to make bread. From there he moved to the River Cafe after ringing "about 10 times" before speaking to Rose Gray, who "terrified the life out of me." He has nothing but praise for his bosses, describing them as "very instinctive cooks who don't like fuss. They're my biggest inspiration, but what they prepare as two middle-aged cooks is different to what I'd prepare as a skint 23-year-old living in London."
He is honest about the fact that many of his recipes are inspired by other chefs, even posing in one of the book's photographs in front of shelves of cookery books written by "rival" chefs. "What happens is, I go out somewhere and eat guinea fowl and I think, what would happen if I did that with a free-range chicken, but put herbs under the skin, and, instead of pan-roasting it, I steam and roast it? Give one recipe to 10 different chefs and you'll come out with 10 different dishes - at the end of the day, cooking is about personality."
He's about halfway through a second book which will be "100 per cent me, with loads more pictures. People like looking at pictures and a lot of text can look quite worrying, I reckon." BBC also wants to do another television series and then there are the plans for a restaurant he wants to open in the next year or so. "It was originally a year but I've just been so busy." His fiancee, a television researcher to whom he's been engaged for two years, "puts up with me," though she's "not interested in food at all".
He's looking for a premises on the riverbank in Cambridge. "London is fine without me and the thing is, I'm quite a hyper, manic person. If I stayed in London I'd kick the bucket, I really would." He grins happily: "I'm quite lucky, really. Everything could have gone pear-shaped but it hasn't."
The Naked Chef is published by Michael Joseph at £16.99 in the UK. The Naked Chef goes out on BBC2 on Wednesdays at 8 p.m.