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The Galloping Gourmet followed in the footsteps of Julia Child's The French Chef, creating the first cooking-as-entertainment show and influencing celebrity chefs to come, including Emeril Lagasse.
After a brief stint working in hotels, London-born chef Graham Kerr worked for the British Army as a catering advisor and then moved to New Zealand to do the same for the Royal New Zealand Airforce. Some of his recipes made it into radio segments and magazines while he was in New Zealand, and when television reached the country he would do cooking demonstrations for various shows.
This led to a series of books. One of these, "The Galloping Gourmets", was written around a worldwide tour he and wine expert Len Evans took to sample various styles of cooking. This basic concept formed was used for his TV show, The Galloping Gourmet.
Filmed at CJOH-TV in Ottawa from 1969 to 1971, each episode would feature footage of Kerr eating dinner with his wife Treena at an exotic locale, followed by a cooking demonstration of one of the dishes. Unlike previous cooking shows, Kerr's recipes would feature ingredients home cooks would have trouble finding, and methods that they would have difficulty duplicating. The cooking was aimed more at entertainment, with Kerr joking with his live audience as he prepared dishes. Each episode would end with Kerr bringing an audience member to the stage to eat his creation.
After Treena had a series of health setbacks in the '70s and '80s (culminating in a heart attack in 1986), he had a Heel Face Turn and shifted to working on diet cookbooks, while simultaneously renouncing the "excesses" and unhealthy recipes of his previous series and even trying to get it removed from syndication. Kerr syndicated a new series, Take Kerr, in the late 1970s, which affirmed his commitment to healthier cooking and also to his born-again Christianity (much to some broadcasters' consternation). Later, he developed the "MiniMax", which was based on exchanging harmful ingredients. The Graham Kerr Show, which was syndicated in the early 1990s, used the same format as the PBS show Frugal Gourmet, re-creating the original show's recipes using this system. And dieters rejoiced. This was followed by several other PBS series and specials and a return to Canadian soil (Toronto this time) for yet another series, Graham Kerr's Gathering Place, in 1999.
Kerr celebrated his 90th birthday in 2024, and also married his second wife that year, nine years after Treena's passing.
The Galloping Gourmet provides examples of:[]
- Don't Try This At Home: Invoked a couple of times, not because a dish was dangerous to cook, but because it was far too complex for amateur cooks to make at home.
- Fancy Dinner: At the start of each episode.
- Food Porn
- Getting Crap Past the Censors: By the bucketload, but particularly the episode featuring the English dish Spotted Dick.
- Once an Episode: Kerr would leap over a chair during the intro, hence the show's title.
- Spiritual Successor: Take Kerr in the '70s and The Graham Kerr Show in the '90s, which made healthier versions of many of the Gourmet's recipes.
- Unfortunate Ingredients: The food featured less than healthy ingredients, particularly large amounts of clarified butter. At one point, a member of the audience criticized him for this, to which he replied...
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Graham: "Madam, you could go outside and get run over by a bus and just think what you would have missed!" |
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- Eventually, Kerr himself came to agree with this critic, and subsequent incarnations of his show would feature healthier recipes. He even came to see his first series as an Old Shame and tried to get it removed from syndication, where it remained popular through the '70s.
- Unintentional Period Piece: By virtue of its concentration on contemporary gourmet food, not to mention its set and the fashions of the audience members.