Jamie Oliver
- Profession: Celebrity chef
- Place/Date of Birth: Clavering, Essex, 27 May 1975
"If I do, it’ll be somewhere a bit exclusive, somewhere that enables me to fulfil my love of food. I’ve still got a long way to go as a chef, that’s for sure."
Jamie, well-known for his crusade against turkey twizzlers and other unhealthy school grub, is proud of his success on the small screen.
"As for TV, I don’t have any strategic marketing plan about what’s next. Besides, how can I improve on School Dinners? That’s probably the pinnacle of my career."
Jamie plays ’prank’ on gran - Dec 20 2006
Cheeky chef Jamie Oliver has revealed that he plays jokes on his gran - including giving her Viagra.
Luckily for Jamie’s gran - the packet just contained sweets.
Speaking on his Christmas podcast, the 31-year-old said: "I absolutely love getting crackers. You can be ridiculous and put anything in them.
"I went into a pharmacy and got a packet of Viagra. I filled it up with Smarties and put it in my gran’s cracker. She looked let down when she found out it was Smarties.
"I also got my bald dad hair growth cream. If someone’s a bit of a prude in the family - like my mother-in-law - I put an awful rude joke in there. It’s just great to see their faces."
Jamie also offers a host of culinary tips and how to organise your Christmas kitchen.
"You can only imagine some of the disasters going on - burnt turkey, fires, fingers getting cut off," he laughs.
New show extolls delights of road-kill - Dec 14 2006
It’s unlikely to be a hit for children’s lunch boxes but Jamie Oliver is making a new TV show about the benefits of eating road-kill.
The BBC programme, by Jamie’s TV production company Fresh One, features pioneering forager and road-kill chef Fergus Drennan.
His delicacies include badger meat balls, roasted duck and wild squirrel stew.
But unlike the meals served up in Jamie’s kitchens and best-selling recipe books, Fergus’s all have one thing in common - the animals met their death on the road.
Drennan, 35, an acquaintance of Oliver, serves the campaigning chef’s restaurant Fifteen as well as celebrity hang-out The Ivy with freshly-foraged weeds, mushrooms, nuts and berries.
A passionate advocate of the benefits of road-kill, he wants to change
If viewers are inspired to follow his example, Fergus’s road-kill recipes are expected to feature on the BBC Three programme website.
In the show, Road Kill Cafe, Drennan goes to Sandwich in
At the end of a three-week stay, he holds a wild meat banquet, offering people the choice to eat either the food he sourced from beaches, forest undergrowths and roadside gutters or from normal channels.
The show, which does not feature Jamie on screen, was announced at the BBC Three winter/spring 2007 season launch today.
TV chef Jamie proves an inspiration - Nov 23 2006
A pub that made school meals as an experiment in Jamie Oliver’s televised quest to improve children’s diets, has moved into the education market full time.
The King’s Head, in Theddlethorpe, Lincs, was beamed into the nation’s living rooms earlier this year when it took part in a scheme thought up by the celebrity chef.
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The young person’s, modern day Delia, Jamie Oliver catapulted himself to fame following a chance meeting at the River Café, he now commands millions for advertisements, has created a socially aware restaurant empire and influenced what our children eat at school.
Despite his slightly grating, ‘cockney’ accent, our Jamie’s actually a born and bred Essex boy. Having been raised to landlord parents he started working in a professional kitchen at the tender age of 11, when he used to peel the veg for the Sunday Roast at the pub.
He trained at Westminster Catering College and spent some time studying in France. On his return to London he bagged himself a job as head pastry chef at the Antonio Carluccio restaurant on Neal Street, before heading over to Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers gastro-delight The River Café. It was here that he was apparently ‘spotted’, whilst a television crew were in doing a dash of filming, and the result was ‘Naked Chef’ in 1998.
His new, fresh and relaxed approach to presenting and food in general went down a storm with the British public and another series followed shortly after in 1999. Over the years his stake in primetime television has grown with a number of successful programmes, including Jamie’s Kitchen, Jamie’s Great Italian Escape and Oliver Twist.
In 2000 Jamie became the ‘face of Sainsburys’, which saw the chef earn a reputed £1.2 million per year, whilst appearing in rather cringe worthy ads left, right and centre of the television scheduling programme. His over exposure led to a bit of a backlash with caricatures of him springing up on the comedy circuit; think big lips, wads of cash, ‘mockney’ accent and floppy wife.
If the Sainsburys deal signalled a temporary fall from grace for the Essex boy, then the series Jamie’s Kitchen saw him return from the back of the pack to take gold. The programme followed the chef as he launched his flagship Fifteen restaurant in London. Part of a charitable foundation, the business offers training for underprivileged kids and branches have gone on to be launched in Newquay, the Netherlands, Amsterdam and Melbourne.
Jamie’s social conscious doesn’t end there either – in 2005 the geeza chef took on the British education system, with a good, long, hard look at what we were feeding the minds of tomorrow – fat, salt and sugar being the main ingredients. The series signalled a social crisis in parliament and forced the Government to reassess school dinners around the country, with the aim of educating our kids about food and it’s origins, whilst providing them with a well-rounded diet.
In 2003 he was awarded an MBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List.
He married Juliette Norton in 2000 and the couple have two daughters.
February 2008