Julia Davis

Mark Gatiss

Jason Watkins

Hayley Atwell

Steven O'Neill

Phil Nice

Jordan Long

Paul Chahidi

Simon Greenall

Jim Field Smith

Clare Wille

Nicholas Burns

Claudie Blakley

Tom Goodman-Hill

Nathan Smoker

Michael Parkhouse

Stuart Sherwin

Richard Syms

Tom Allen

Abby Ford

Tim Plester

Keir Charles

Ella Kenion

James Holmes

Coky Giedroyc

Brian Fillis

Angie Daniell

Ben Evans

Martin Coates

Lorna Whittaker

Ben Jerritt

Dee Taylor

Tamara-Lee Notcutt

John Hagenstede

Dan Fontaine

Hannah Moseley

Richard Mills

Annie Townsend

Rupert Simon

Chris Burdon

Pete Gates

Ben Norrington

Carrie Hilton

Richard Dyer

Lesley Lamont-Fisher

Emma Fryer

Miko Giedroyć

Mark Thornton

Lynne Whiteread

David Marsh

Sally Woodward Gentle

Fear of Fanny

CinemaSerf

For those of us of a certain age, Fanny Craddock was an household name who seemed to polarise opinion in Britain as she emerged as the country’s first television chef. She (Julia Davis) was famed, along with her husband Johnnie (Mark Gatiss) and this attempts to take us through a chronology of her rise and fall. Right from the outset, though, this struggles to deliver. Though Davis herself delivers quite a solid performance, it doesn’t really bear much resemblance to the actual woman herself - and there is plenty of televised evidence that this is more of a dramatisation based around her career than any serious effort at presenting an authoritative biopic. Gatiss delivers well enough, but here again his persona seems more affected than the real life gent. She was a formidable and pioneering woman in real life, but here she seems more preposterous with her excesses - and yes, there were a few of those, exaggerated without us ever really feeling we are getting to know what made this woman tick. It also joins her life later in her career, so we never quite get to grips with just what contributed to her fairly phenomenal success in the first place as she tried to wean the masses away from spam, egg and chips towards something that might actually include something green and healthy. It’s lively enough and were it a drama about an entirely fictitious character, it might have fared better but with so much readily available on the real Fanny Craddock, this doesn’t really do her much justice.