Lawson was entirely on her own – her children are now in their 20s – and says she found the enforced pause “wonderful, which I know sounds awful. To this day, she often imagines she’s telling Thomasina her recipes when she’s writing her books. Asked to give evidence, Lawson admitted that she had used drugs in order to make “an intolerable situation bearable”, describing her former husband of almost a decade as “a brilliant but brutal man” who had subjected her to “intimate terrorism”. Lawson is on the case like the fifth emergency service. I tell her I admire her preparedness. “When I was really young, I hated being saddled with such a distinctive name. Listeners to Norton’s BBC2 Radio program will be hoping that part of the move to Virgin will include Maria McErlane who co-presents some of the best parts of Norton’s program on Saturdays. It’s easy to assume that we know Lawson. I guess,” she says. Regular features include the agony aunt slot Grill Graham, with co-presenter Maria McErlane, and his pick of a cheesy song of the week, I Can't Believe It's Not Better. “Sometimes I think food preoccupies me too much,” she tells me, sitting on a sofa. She is an actress, known for Children of Men (2006), Hotel Babylon (2006) and Killing Eve (2018). I have a Vegemite sandwich if you want it,” she asks, returning to Mark. And then there was Diamond. Please. Virgin Radio’s latest star signing, Graham Norton, will take to the air for his first show at 9.30am on Saturday, 9th January. On top of any natural shyness, Lawson was clearly, it seemed, traumatised by the court case. Has Nigella Lawson found happiness at last? “He was her gregarious side and she was his calm, and then those roles had to switch,” McErlane says. Veteran disc jockey Tony … An established journalist before becoming a celebrity cook, she prefers to write her own articles; after all, when you write your own copy you are in control. But what was so bad about hers? But there is a gently melancholic air, with references to the kitchen as a safe space in turbulent times, and solitary suppers. Maria McErlane (born 9 December 19571) voiced Bianca in the Big Finish Doctor Who audio story The Wormery and Matka in the Bernice Summerfield audio stories Year Zero and Dead Man's Switch. And that’s how I feel about everything: you plough on. It’s tiresome, and it’s tiresome now, but what can you do?” Why did her parents give all their daughters girlified boys’ names? Another friend of Lawson’s, who stayed close throughout her marriage to Saatchi, concurs: “Let’s just say there weren’t cosy dinners in the kitchen any more.” Saatchi is a gazillionaire, and yet, throughout their marriage, Lawson continued to work. “That’s the point of life, isn’t it? But it must have been odd to be writing recipes in April when people were queueing to get into supermarkets, I say. “The trouble with modern cooking is that the mood it induces in the cook is one of skin-of-the-teeth efficiency, all briskness and little pleasure,” she writes in 2000’s How To Be A Domestic Goddess. “He had this sense of ease in himself, and that made the air around him comfortable,” Lawson says. Even in a black jumpsuit (“I’m the sucker who buys things from Instagram ads”) and Birkenstocks (“the only shoes I’ve worn for months”) she has a slightly regal air that brings to mind a queen distributing food to the masses. He even resembled her father, which, surely, even if only on a subliminal level, compounded the sense of being taken care of. Health: Maria McErlane: Health and Deficiency It s the bit of the body you never thought you could exercise Sunday November 24 2002, 12.00am , The Sunday Times Lawson wasn’t on trial, although it was easy to forget that, as both the Grillo sisters and Saatchi gave lurid testimonies about her on the stand. Lawson with her late husband, John Diamond, in 2000. When Diamond died of cancer, she took just two weeks off from filming her show, although she later said she had depression afterwards. Food Styling: Andie Redman. “Well, who knows whether someone needs to carry on working financially?” she says with a pointed laugh. The couple had a fraught relationship. Top in main image: stories.com. But she is also very aware of the risks of teetering into self-parody, a line she has arguably crossed in the past on TV (see previously mentioned spoon-licking, and the many, many “Nigella does sexy cooking” mashups on YouTube). Maria McErlane, Actress: Children of Men. View the profiles of professionals named "Maria Mcerlane" on LinkedIn. “It’s not an image, it’s an armour. And what are you going to eat for lunch? Registered in England No. “Various things that I can’t… I don’t think any of us [siblings] would regard it as a childhood we would want to return to.” In a 2012 interview, she said her mother would shout at the children, “I’m going to hit you until you cry.” “She just didn’t like me,” Lawson told Simon Schama, “maybe because I came after Dominic the princeling and I was my father’s girl, she was jealous, I don’t know.”. I often think about a line in How To Cook, about saving ham bones to flavour future soups: “It may make your freezer look like Dennis Nilsen’s, but that’s a small price to pay.” In her new book, Cook, Eat, Repeat, Lawson’s first in three years, she says that she so often puts reminders into her phone about chicken that whenever she writes “‘Ta’ the phone autocompletes it as ‘Take chicken out of fridge’, no matter if what I actually intended was ‘Tax return’”. Lawson divorced him shortly afterwards, but her private life was laid more bare than ever just a few months later, when the couple’s former assistants, Francesca and Elisabetta Grillo, were taken to court, accused of stealing hundreds of thousands of pounds using the household’s credit cards. Taking pleasure in food is not just about cooking – it’s about thinking, ‘I’ve got myself something delicious’.”. Few know better than her the importance of controlling your environment when you can’t control anything else. image caption Actress and presenter Maria McErlane co-hosts the Grill Graham feature In addition to the music and celebrity guests, the enduring popularity of Norton's show owes much to … It’s so great! Did she ever resent her father for lumbering her with what was essentially his name? Registered office: 1 London Bridge Street, SE1 9GF. The jury found the Grillos not guilty, but as the two women (rightly) said afterwards: “We have won the court case but definitely [Lawson] had the most support from the public.”. She’s also a celebrity and television personality within the business. She doesn’t worry so much about how she looks and now often wears jumpsuits, even though they are, she says (wrongly), “very unflattering on me. “I know, and I used to feel, what a luxury, to not cope on the outside. Virgin Radio UK is 100% owned by Wireless, which was acquired by News UK in 2016. Nigella Lawson: ‘I didn't think I’d be a mended person, but I am’, Nigella Lawson: ‘You plough on. Also, she is funny, an underrated quality in cookbooks. But all that cookery-porn nonsense was always just for the TV shows; feeding actual people is a different matter. “I think it became a pattern. Carnal Knowledge was a short-lived 1996 British television game show relating to sex. Reaching out, making connections,” she says. I very much like having no public life.” One of her greatest pleasures during the long stretch of solitude was to stop writing at the end of the afternoon and relax on her sofa with a Campari and soda, and “that fantastically retro thing of putting crisps in a bowl. Two years later, Lawson married Saatchi. As in 2021, Maria McErlane‘s age is * years. (Instead she credits her complexion to “no sun and eating lots of fats”.) Maria McErlane, the co-presenter of the programme's Grill Graham problem spot, ended up carrying much of show on her own. We have noticed that there is an issue with your subscription billing details. As well as the book, she has a new TV series, filmed with largely the same crew she has worked with since the early 2000s. This is at least partly because Lawson wrote much of it during lockdown, which necessitated her doing a handbrake turn in the middle of one essay, originally about how to throw a dinner party without hating your guests, and making it instead about the importance of dinner. She hesitates and then says, “I’m not sure I would have thought I’d be a mended person, which I am.”, Did she feel under pressure to maintain a strong image during the trial? She has been around for so long, letting us into her own kitchen (in the first TV series) and then simulacrums thereon afterwards, her face perfectly lit by the glow of her giant refrigerator, or the fairy lights decked around her elegant garden. I didn’t have an eating disorder, but I really hated family mealtimes. Where Slater connects food with the shifts of life – the seasons and one’s own maturation – Lawson roots it in pleasure: the pleasures of cooking, feeding, eating. Cook, Eat, Repeat is Lawson’s most writerly book yet, the recipes interspersed with long essays on subjects such as A Loving Defence Of Brown Food, and (of course) Pleasures, the point being that there is no such thing as a guilty one. Contact Jackie Gill Management limited: 3 Warren Mews, London, W1T 6AN. With her second husband, Charles Saatchi, in 2009. They’re not coping on the inside and they’re coping on the outside’.”. But I’m very happy not having to fill up my life going to things. I was naively gobsmacked by the gap between the image and the reality: Lawson was shy, vulnerable and so anxious she seemed to quiver in her seat. Lawson turned 60 this year and that, combined with lockdown has brought some changes. Another theory (and, believe me, table-tennis man has many) is that with everyone on variations of the Atkins diet, and dinner parties consisting of a cube of protein and a handful of nuts, the one-time ritual of breaking bread with friends has been reduced to a 35-second gobble, nigh on impossible to stretch beyond 9.30. It’s more fun, she adds, to be “trailing nutmeggy fumes of baking pie in our languorous wake… winning adoring glances and endless approbation”. She has been talking about her love of that, and her abject terror that someone in her vicinity might be slightly peckish, for three decades now, ever since the publication of her first cookbook, 1998’s How To Eat. “My attitude towards food is such a repudiation of her, a triumph over her, thinking, ‘I’m not going to play that game. So when she emailed, suggesting a drink, I piled on the makeup, expecting a fearsome glamazon. She looks a little nonplussed by my joyless take. It was hosted by Also, I think, despite the shyness and public masks, Lawson wanted at least someone who had written about her ordeal to understand who she really is. “I just think matzos is a really good vehicle for other things, like butter with Maldon salt, or Roquefort,” she says. She can hide behind that whole public persona,” says her friend, the actor Maria McErlane. Maria McErlane (born 9 December 1957, in Buckinghamshire, England) is a British actress and presenter specialising in comedy.She has been acting since 1984. To order a copy for £22.62, visit the Guardian Bookshop. Nigella Lawson’s new book, Cook, Eat, Repeat, grabbing her by the throat and holding her nose. And then she raises her throaty voice a little, which she does when she’s playing to the gallery: “Also, I’m just really greedy.”, Lawson knows how people see her: Lady Bountiful, a sensualist celebrator of appetite. Graham Norton presents a saucy adult quiz show made for ITV by Rapido Television, that lifts the lid off viewers' sex habits. Lawson recently recorded the audiobook for How To Eat, to mark its 20th anniversary, returning to many little references to her home life with Diamond, and found it “incredibly exhausting, all the quick denial and blocking of emotions. As a child, food was “a horror”. Well, of course she is: the only thing that would be more on brand would be if she were suggestively licking a spoon. I’ve brought three bags! Friends recall cosy dinners round theirs with Diamond, the ebullient host, and Lawson quietly enjoying herself by his side, learning from him how to be comfortable in herself. Both the show and the book feel brilliantly, though accidentally, well-timed; what else are we all going to do this winter but stay home and read, cook and watch TV? But sometimes people don’t cope on the outside, either. But I’ve decided I don’t care.” I ask if she’s seeing anyone now and she laughs. Her friends talk about how she has developed “coping mechanisms” over the years, a term Lawson scoffs at, but I suspect at least one of these involves conserving her emotional energy and staying in with a bowl of crisps when she can. I’d gone to meet her that night expecting to glean some fabulous life lessons; I came away worried about her, and we stayed in occasional email contact. Instead, Lawson – like Nigel Slater, who gained prominence in the mid-90s – offers beautiful writing that makes you want to read her books as much as cook from them. Registered office: 1 London Bridge Street, SE1 9GF. “Do you want some Twiglets? When we think of Lawson, we think of her hosting those lovely dinner parties on her show, surrounded by people and noise. She’s one of the very widely used personality in England. Maria McErlane was created in England on December 9th from the year 1957. Lisa-Marie McErlane | I'm Lisa-Marie, I'm happily married and have a daughter, she's my absolute world! Like the whole of Britain, I had followed the Grillos’ trial, and in particular the photos of Lawson arriving at it every day: hair blow-dried to perfection, chin always up; she looked gloriously defiant, even as she went through what was obviously a horrific ordeal. She has a knack towards fashion and traveling. She has appeared in several TV series, including The Fast Show, Gimme Gimme Gimme, Thin Ice and Happiness, "straight" roles in The Bill and Holby City and as the narrator for Antoine de Caunes and Jean-Paul Gaultier's Eurotrash. As bridge is the preserve of the barely living, and poker played properly needs the wealth of Croesus, table tennis is just about genteel enough to be socially acceptable. “With John, you used to see her at dinner parties and things. She was one of four: a brother, Dominic, now a journalist, and two sisters, Thomasina and Horatia. I think it’s very hard [looking back on that time] without feeling that thing in your throat, because it was taken away, so it’s quite hard to locate the happiness.” Diamond died in 2001. I was warned before this interview by Lawson’s team not to ask about Saatchi. Is it genetic? Well, of course she is: the only thing that would be more on brand would be if she were suggestively licking a spoon. She has been around for so long, letting us into her own kitchen (in the first TV series) and then simulacrums thereon afterwards, her face perfectly lit by the glow of her giant refrigerator, or the fairy lights decked around her elegant garden. But all that cookery-porn nonsense was always just for the TV shows; feeding actual people is a different matter. “And that really does surprise me, because I didn’t think [happiness] was one of my gifts,” she says. “I don’t know if it was the calm of lockdown, or getting older, but I’ve stopped looking back on the past an awful lot. “You know, if you knock something over it will be difficult, and I’m clumsy… ” Her mother liked to cook, but didn’t really allow herself to eat what she liked until she was dying, at the age of 48, from liver cancer. MARIA McErlane is one of the nation's regular agony aunts and has been a staple of British television for over two decades, heavily featured in both Graham Norton's radio show and This Morning. Maria McErlane is popular as a celebrity and because of her visual appearance. “Believe me, I spent a lot of time under a duvet. “Nigella has a very maternal spirit, but she’s both mother and child: you want to take care of her,” says the journalist Fiona Golfar, her best friend of 40 years. Maria McErlane presents a vibrant mix of music and celebrity guests. But that’s not how she sees herself. “I hated childhood, the lack of autonomy, and the only thing you have control over [at that age] is whether you eat or not. “I’m not going to answer that!” Most pleasing to her, she’s stopped being “a ruminator”. View Maria McErlane’s profile on LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional community.