By James Murray
If someone had to give me very bad news, I would quite like it to be A A Gill.
The witty restaurant reviewer, travel writer and general raconteur has a charming way of telling you the awful truth; something people who are only paying him passing attention mistake for rudeness.
But Gill isn’t being rude – he’s just being himself. Bluntly honest, sharply funny and remarkably open about his own flaws.
He is a contradiction in terms: A man in immaculate tailoring with penguin-classic orange socks, who sneers at the pretention of foie gras sushi and other menu language disasters.
“The thing about chefs,” he says, “is they all left school at fourteen.”
But his point is serious. Here, as in the UK, there has been an explosion of restaurants and the skilled labour supply cannot meet the hungersome demand.
Fetishising food is something the chattering classes don’t even notice today. We barely blink in surprise at the apocalyptic music that signals a tense commercial break in a show like Masterchef, while we are asked to wait with baited breath to find out whether Ben from Northcote has overcooked his lamb rack.
A lone audience member comments that we are all obsessed with drizzling something over something else but if the TVNZ programme’s ratings are anything to go by we don’t really care that it’s poncy, it’s our new party and we’ll subtly undermine everyone else with it if we want to.
But Gill says “we live with the fantasy of choice”. All these new restaurants, all this new food and really there are only “about 18 different dishes”.
And this is what Gill is all about – making you admit how bloody crass you really are.
He’s happy to do the same to himself; talking candidly about his alcoholism and drug addiction.
Gill was a full-blown alcoholic until he was 40, a topper upper who drank all day every day. His friends say they never saw him drunk, he says “au contraire, you never saw me sober”.
He sold drugs to make ends meet – telling a Thatcherite politician that his occupation epitomised their ‘get-on-your-bike-and-do-it-yourself’ philosophy.
He talks compellingly about what it was like to sober up.
“When you stop being an alcoholic you have to decide who you are,” he tells restaurateur and host Al Brown.
“I went into Oxfam shops and bought the life of another person.”
There were tutus and monocles among “the suits of long dead people” as Gill rebuilt his life and became the assured man he is today.
But let’s not forget this is a Readers and Writers Festival and Gill is here to talk about his writing.
Gill is dyslexic, started writing at 40 and dictates his stories down the phone to an editor.
“I can’t write. I write really slowly, and I move my lips when I do it,” he says, before talking about being perplexed that the ‘cure’ for dyslexia is always more writing.
This he portrays as a strength – advising would-be writers to read their work out loud. If it sounds clunky or you have used a word like “opined” that no one in their right mind would use in normal conversation, then there’s a good chance you’ve written rubbish.
His colourful background is another advantage; life experiences and a personality earned from hitting rock-bottom and getting back up being more useful than a double first from Oxbridge.
The restaurant reviews can be savage, they can be wistful and rambling, but they are almost always excellent. The hardest to write, he says, are the average restaurants – what can you say in 1400 words about a meal that was adequate in every way.
He tries to review from the viewpoint of the punter, going to restaurants because he is hungry and admitting he is no more qualified than the next man to be a restaurant reviewer. Restaurateurs sometimes complain they have been given a bad review by a critic who has never worked in a restaurant, but restaurants are serving food to the average person and it is their view of the food that counts not the chef’s.
And if a restaurant claims their bad review is the result of only just opening, Gill says tough, they shouldn’t be charging full prices.
This ‘man of the people’ attitude extends to his travel and television writing. Places make people he claims, citing the example of immigrants from ancient and sophisticated cultures embracing the stereotyped snags and stubbies culture in Australia within six months of getting off the plane.
The first goal of travel writing for Gill is to bring the reader with you, not to make him feel jealous that you are there and he is at home. It's more about accidentally bumping into an old school friend atop a Guatemalan mountain than rapturous descriptions of grandeur or solitude.
When he talks about television he is passionate about how poorly television companies treat their audience. In no other industry, he says, do the people who make the product sneer at the people who consume the product.
He’s not a fan of reality television and gutter, formulaic eye-candy, but he is an ardent supporter of good television. His homeland is guilty of making plenty of both.
Britain really should stop its reality television programmes at the border and burn them. They make the UK out to be a nation of gormless morons matched only in stupidity by the gormless, morons who watch such programmes seriously.
On the other hand, British comedy, news and documentary is only matched occasionally by the US for quality, and this is the television Gill sees as the vibrant culture of his generation.
Ratings have become an end in themselves, according to Gill, who compares television to a toddler who plays obsessively with a concept like reality television before breaking it and losing all interest, wondering why they ever thought it was a good idea in the first place.
He’s not all wit and dry comment. He tears up when talking about his favourite meal – a shared tub of ice cream with a father dying of Alzheimer’s Disease.
I left last night’s conversation feeling I knew quite a bit more of this interesting character. Gill had reminded me what good writing is all about and good food and travel – which is pretty much what a critic sets out to do.
I leave you with a Gillism that I thought was particularly good.
“The thing about double entendres is they only ever mean one thing.”
Gill often means two things at once, but I think he always means well.
A A Gill’s latest collection of travel writing, Here and There, is out this month.
3 News
source: newshub archive
