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Giles Talks
Giles On Giles
Your main job is as a restaurant critic – that's a pretty good gig isn't it?
Absolutely. It's the one thing I do that I won't yield. I knocked my opinion column on the head for a while because I was so busy. When you've got 14-hour days of filming for six or seven days a week, you don't feel like writing much. But there was no question about keeping up the restaurant thing.
It's really exciting when you've only got 24 hours to get a piece done; you phone your girlfriend and say: ‘We've got to go to some blinding restaurant tonight and then send the bill to Rupert Murdoch or my career's over.’ It's probably the nicest kind of career pressure you can have.
That raises the question of why you wanted to go and make this programme when you've got such a cushy number going anyway?
[laughs] Because it's not quite as cushy as doing TV. That's probably the answer! I started doing a bit of TV not because I went in search of it, but because people started asking. I've done various things on the back of the ridiculous explosion of media interest in food, but this one is properly exciting. It's a proper Channel 4 programme with an interesting subject.
Have you found it an educational experience?
Oh yes. This was all about informing and educating myself about things like GM foods. You get to a point, when you're a journalist, where you get some plum job like restaurant critic and you stop learning.
I thought that after I'd done this slightly hard-working thing of travelling around the US in an A Team-style van (except without any guns in the back), staying in some real dives and interviewing some wackos, I'd probably know quite a lot about this subject.
That would be quite useful as I tend to toss on about it quite a lot anyway. I'd always gone ‘Ooh, GM is so bad!’ and now I sort of understand the science which is a real benefit. It's the first time I've really learned anything since school, and I didn't learn an awful lot there.
You didn't approach this as a fan of biotechnology did you?
I wasn't a fan of any ology: I've never been a scientist. If you write about food and you're into organic farming and sustainability and you read scare stories in newspapers that say ‘Mad Human Pig!’ written by and large by people who don't understand the science, you take it onboard.
