Eating With Cilla Black (BBC2); Alive: Back To The Andes (five): WHEN Cilla Black had a number one hit with Anyone Who Had A Heart, little did we know she was singing about one of her favourite foods.
Growing up in Liverpool during rationing, her mother had to be resourceful in putting food on the table. Offal was the answer. No part of the beast went to waste. Hearts, brains, feet, tails, liver and tongues of animals were affordable and tasty food.
Cilla's love for such food remains. Cooking liver and bacon, she declared that everyone should have offal once a week. Or to misquote Dick Emery's catchphrase, "Ooh, you are offal, but I like you".
The recipe for the Eating With series is simple but effective, combining the life story of a celebrity with their food likes over the years.
Cilla introduced us to the odd combination of Oxo and oranges. She'd rub the cube on half an orange and suck the result. It got her into trouble because, as a Catholic, the slightest taste of meat on a Friday was a sin, and Oxo counted because it was a meat cube.
As a successful pop singer, she was thrown into a world of hotel room service and fancy restaurants, where Beatle George Harrison introduced her to avocados by ordering it as a starter. Today, she still loves avocado with prawns.
Her late husband Bobby Willis was a better cook than her, although one Sunday lunch ended in disaster after she criticised his crackling ("yer crackling had got to crackle") and failure to stuff the joint like her mother used to do. "Stuff you and stuff your mother," he shouted, opening the door and throwing the meal over the balcony of their flat.
Today, offal is an expensive, much sought-after delicacy. Cilla visited a restaurant that charges £15 for a plate of animal innards that her mother used to buy for a few pence.
The only food on the menu in Alive: Back To The Andes was raw meat. It should have been human flesh but even celebrities draw the line at eating each other for the sake of ratings.
An intriguing mix of celebrities - Adam Rickitt, Carole Caplin, Jean-Christophe Novelli and Lord Frederick Windsor - are recreating the ten-day trek in the Andes made by plane crash survivors 33 years ago.
As we watch their efforts, real life survivors recall their horrific ordeal after an aircraft carrying an amateur rugby team crashed in the Andes.
The bit the celebrities can't recreate is eating their dead companions, as the original survivors did to stay alive. They've been given raw meat instead which is particularly hard on ex-Corrie star and prospective Tory MP Rickitt as he's a vegetarian.
Survivors told how they took the decision to eat the corpses of their companions because, as one said, "Protein was in the muscles of our friends, it's the energy you need."
Survivor Nando Parrado had no doubt what others would do in similar circumstances: "One hundred per cent of people watching would do the same thing."
Published: 30/03/2006
