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Whatsapp Peter Russell-Clarke, the straight talking television chef.

For nine years during the 1980s he was the man with the neckerchief, the beard and the cheeky sense of humour, but there’s actually much more to Peter Russell-Clarke. Ann Jones sat down with the former celebrity chef turned agriculture advocate and successful painter.

For a bloke who isn’t a trained chef, he certainly had me fooled.

He used to energetically move across my childhood television screen, often in a chef’s uniform with a little neckerchief tied jauntily at the collar. He had a distinctive beard and hairdo combo.

Peter Russell-Clarke was not only one of the first celebrity chefs in Australia, he was also a man before his time.

The mothers and fathers sat there with their children to force the little buggers to watch it, so I had all ages.

He spent nine years making hundreds of episodes of Come and Get It with Peter Russell-Clarke, a program which he conceived, wrote and starred in.

‘I was illustrating and writing for television when [TV] first started. In fact, I did the first flip-card that appeared on television; it was a caricature of Alwyn Kurts,’ says Russell-Clarke.

‘But I also wrote the odd script and I thought there was a place for a cooking show. So I wrote a little script for a cooking show and I thought I’d put in a little bearded chef to do the presenting, because the fellow in front of the camera gets more money than the bloke who writes the bloody stuff.

‘So I popped myself in front of the camera and said g’day.’

Lord only knows how many times he said it in his television career. There were about 900 episodes of Come and Get It, so if you include the theme music that’s at least 2,700 ‘g’days’ on the ABC alone.

‘What we did is set out to explain, mainly to children, the advantage of eating certain things, and the ABC understood that their charter was to entertain and educate, and that’s what we did. You didn’t need to have bells and whistles to make that happen.

‘What we did was go out into the paddocks and pull the carrots up, dust them off, run them under the tap and then cook them, so children understood that carrots don’t come from shops, they come from the ground.

‘A lot of the people that are now mothers and fathers grew up as kids watching the program on the ABC. I was very lucky because the children didn’t want to watch the program, but the mothers made them watch the program. They said, “Unless you watch this bloody food program, you’re not allowed to watch Inspector Gadget.”

‘The mothers and fathers sat there with their children to force the little buggers to watch it, so I had all ages,’ says Russell-Clarke with trademark cheekiness.

When you’ve seen someone on the television over such a long period of time, it’s often a bit startling to find that they exist outside the box. As it turns out, though, there is a lot more to Russell-Clarke than carrying around a backpack full of cheese to dole out to cheese-less picnics—though he’s definitely done that too.

Over the years, he’s been a spokesperson for industry groups across Australia: dairy, avocados, cheese and butter among others.

‘I’ve never actually flogged anything, or in my belief I haven’t; anything that I have attempted to promote is always been grown on an Australian farm because I believe that the Australian farmer is the most efficient in the world. Not believe—he is the most efficient in the world,' he says.

‘When I was a boy, 50 per cent of our export income came from agriculture, it’s now down to 12 per cent.

‘We’ve got a beautiful country with all the facilities to grow food for the rest of the world and yet we don’t. We’ve got politicians who’ve got their... where do politicians put their heads? Under their armpits or elsewhere. They don’t seem to understand that Australia needs to grow things.’

Russell-Clarke has also produced several successful commercials and was a UN ambassador around the issue of food co-operatives.

While he’s done many things in his career, he has always had another creative outlet: his art. You can see his paintings in the background of the Come and Get It kitchen scenes. Who do you think drew the title animation? You guessed it.

According to Russell-Clarke, his art is pretty big in Malaysia.

It all started when he received a commission to paint works for a new high-rise building.

‘I do a lot of paintings for buildings in Melbourne: you know, when you walk into the foyer of a building there’s big paintings all over the place you can’t quite understand, and when you hop into a lift you get out and you’re faced with some artist’s daubs on the wall.’

One apartment owner, a Malaysian businessman, liked the paintings so much he commissioned Russell-Clarke to paint works for office buildings all around Asia.

‘They buy big paintings, God bless them, seven foot by five foot big things and they order them in batches. They’ve asked me to go over to hold an exhibition in Malaysia in Penang. They’ve also asked me to do a television program over there,’ he says.

Russell-Clarke isn’t showing signs of slowing down too much, despite being into his eighties, though he says he gave up farming his central Victorian property because he’s ‘too old and too dopey’.

He explains his long and varied career by saying that because he’s never been spectacularly talented in any one area, he's done lots of things.

‘I don’t retire because I’ve got nothing to retire from,’ he says.

And he looks exactly the same as the last time you saw him in his chef’s uniform. A little more grey perhaps, but still wearing a little neckerchief tied jauntily around his neck.

Celebrity chefs then and now:

RN Breakfast is the show informed Australians wake up to. Start each day with comprehensive coverage and analysis of national and international events, and hear interviews with the people who matter today—along with those who’ll be making news tomorrow.

