Naptime Five Hundred #5: Brian Turner's Bread and Butter

You may know Brian Turner as the TV celebrity chef who blusters in a Yorkshire whine that he's right about everything. His philosophy can be summed up thus: shepherd’s pie and spotted dick are much better than any of that foreign muck – a view you’d expect from your slightly racist Uncle Tony, but not so much from a supposed culinary icon.

Everyone knows this is poppycock. Anyone who insists that the imported way (concoct a simple yet tuneful blend of subtle herbs, punchy spices and mouthwatering sauces) is inferior to the British method (smother in lard and flour, then cremate at gas mark 11 for sixteen hours) is an imbecile. I’ll bet anything Brian Turner, as a debutant restaurateur in the eighties, was at least partly responsible for all that backlash nouvelle-britannique bullsugar, subjecting foodies to microscopic portions of tripe and onion for sixty quid.

So, it shocks one not that the man – contrary to his no-nonsense, lowborn demeanour – is a shrewd business fellow. Not one to shy away from a soupcon of self-publicity and dinero, he’s now the face of a range of rip-off sandwiches.

You’ll find them in buy-this-here-or-starve establishments. You know, motorway services, airports, Londis shops positioned miles from any half decent supermarket. Hospitals, too. I bought two for me and the wife during the usual five-hour wait in children’s A & E. For your concern, my daughter had a nasty gastro-viral thing. She needed a drip and a two-night stay-over, but she’s fine now. The Naptime Five Hundred is back in business.

What did we make of Brian’s butties? Actually, not bad, I admit with a nagging sense of shame. My wife, who had professed a lump in her throat, was seduced by the blurb (in Brian’s world, “bacon and egg” is something like “delicately coddled scrambled hen embryo with rashers of freshy slaughtered ale-sodden suckling Tamworth). She opined, with all the promise of a budding food critic, that is was “nice”.

In kiddie casualty, a bloke’s job is twofold: to get stuff (already achieved) and to lighten the mood. So, unoriginally, I quipped that they’re nice because Brian makes them with his own bare hands. Consumed by fatigue and anxiety, we could at least raise a smile at the thought of Turner beavering away in a factory kitchen, buttering and laying meagre allowances of processed pork with the heed of a perfectionist.

Internet reviews I checked were not so generous as we. Sandwichguide.co.uk bluntly concludes:

BLT: Horrendously mediocre.
Egg and bacon: Where’s the bacon? (Good point. “Rashers” is a breach of trust.)
Chicken and bacon: You’d think it came from a supermarket.

The latter is the nail on the head. My beef is the £2.25 price label. Tesco’s seafood cocktail is as good as anything “by” Turner, and costs a quid less. You pay that extra nicker to see his ugly boat race and some descriptive bravado on the plastic lid.

I’d pay more than one pound sterling to never see his stupid moustache again.

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