Haven’t we had enough Cornwall? No county flashes more curves and bares more crannies on British television. Cap’n Ross Poldark gallops picturesquely along its sea cliffs, while Doc Martin harrumphs up and down the winding lanes of Portwenn (real name Port Isaac). But there’s more to come. ITV and BBC1 have their Cornish confections, and for Christmas, Sky has gone and created its own bittersweet antidote.
It’s called Delicious, and it stars Dawn French and Emilia Fox as two women who have been married to the same serially unfaithful master chef (played by Iain Glen), by whom each has had a child. By the time their story is done, Cornwall’s main arteries will be ever more clotted with cars delivering visitors to the creamy drama locations as seen on TV. But it’s not a case of once more unto the beach.
Unlike Doc Martin and Poldark, Delicious shows a different side to the county, in which the sea is not spotted once. The opening shot, as Glen effects introductions in a voiceover, is a drone’s-eye view of rolling hills, through which the Tamar cuts a meandering path under train viaducts on its stately way to Plymouth Sound.
The reason it’s set in Cornwall is French. When the script reached her, it made no reference to a particular locale. “The C word wasn’t involved to begin with,” she explains. “It wasn’t set here. It was somewhere rural, was all I knew. I did say to the producer, ‘I’ve got a logistical problem, which is that I was away for the first four months of this year on tour in Australia and New Zealand. I don’t want to go away for another three months and film this in the north.’ The producer is from Cornwall, and she said, ‘Why not film it here?’”
“Here” turned out to be Pentillie Castle, for French an hour’s commute from her home near Fowey. A castellated country house on the banks of the Tamar, it was built in the late 17th century, then altered in the early 19th. The terrace and lawn are ideal for weddings and, in Delicious, for the role of the Penrose, a hotel and restaurant founded by Leo Vincent (Glen) and his first wife, Gina (French), who has Sicilian heritage.
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Leo is a lothario whose eye roved many years in the direction of Sam (Fox), to whom he is now married, only to be straying once again. That old adage — that the mistress who lures her man up the aisle creates a vacancy — is duly played out, but with a twist that explores the love triangle from an uncommon and intriguing angle. From the second episode onwards, Delicious turns into a study of an unexpected female alliance, with a side order of 21st-century family dynamics and plenty on the psychology of food.
French says that she had no intention of doing a drama. In recent years, she has remarried, become a novelist and toured her one-woman stage memoir, Thirty Million Minutes. She has another novel planned, and wants to write a second stage show, this time about her life in comedy. So she thought her days of 4am alarm calls to get to set were over.
“To be absolutely honest, I didn’t want to do anything in front of a camera again. Luckily, it was easy to say no to everything I was sent. I thought this was going to be the same. I was having a cursory look through the outline and had a feeling of dread — ‘Oh no, I’m going to want to do this. Dammit.’”
Her most recent acting gig of any substance was in the James Corden comedy The Wrong Mans, in 2014, on which she met Fox. “I had a bit of pep when I heard it was going to be Emilia. I thought, ‘Good, that will work.’”
Fox is on secondment from her day job as Dr Nikki Alexander in Silent Witness, which has afforded her a steady income for 12 years. She also recently sunk her teeth into the role of a human trafficker, “a terrible woman doing appalling things”, in The Tunnel, Sky’s Anglo-French version of The Bridge.
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“The great thing about Delicious is that it gives you a chance to do something completely different,” she says. “Sam is in a paranoid state when you first meet her, trying to hang on to youth and feel attractive. As a woman in her forties, when you’re starting to feel insecure, I really understood that.”
With its evasion of pigeonholes — Fox isn’t vampy; French isn’t funny; it’s never clear who you should root for — Delicious feels like something BBC1 and ITV would have cautiously said no to. The script is by Dan Sefton, hitherto a hired writer on the likes of Mr Selfridge and Death in Paradise. Given the chance to create his own world, he has taken infidelity and food, and out of these staple ingredients conjured up something that both leading ladies latched on to (and that attracted Sheila Hancock to play Mimi, Leo’s acid-tongued mother).
“Somehow Dan Sefton has listened to and watched women in a way that I haven’t come across before, especially with a male writer,” says French, whose last serious dramatic role was in Lucy Gannon’s Tender Loving Care, about a nurse who dispatches her patients, back in 1993. “It’s frayed, difficult, complicated stuff, and I think that’s what I was drawn to.”
“It’s lovely to see a writer who writes so well for women of all ages,” Fox agrees. “It isn’t simply about two women who have been married to the same man and don’t like each other.”
The two actresses, coming at the job from different traditions, have contrasting approaches to preparation. Fox totes a thick ring-bound folder in which she keeps what she calls “a map of character”, including a dense backstory. She opens a page on a series of paragraphs written in red ink. “This is catastrophe,” it says of scene 55. Scene 60: “From hope back to despair.” Scene 69: “First idea of whether she and Gina could...” But to say more would give the game away. “I’ve got used to it from Silent Witness,” Fox says, “there being so much plot.”
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French says she’s “errant in that department. I would regard that as homework.”
The differences between French and Fox help to feed into the central dynamic of Delicious, that a man might fall for two such profoundly antithetical women: a short, large, expansive Italian brunette versus a tall, pencil-thin, uptight English blonde. For both women, as for all those around them, food is character. Sam is an obsessive for whom healthy eating is a form of control. In a manifestation of matricidal rage, Gina’s daughter Teresa (Tanya Reynolds) will barely eat at all. Leo’s furtive nature is expressed in his theft of all Gina’s recipes. Gina herself is a bountiful provider for whom food equals love but also status.
“I had to go quite a long way to find the foodie part of this character,” French says. “I’m not a great cook myself. I’ve fed my family, nobody’s died, but I don’t have a natural flourish.”
Somebody dies in the first episode of Delicious. The Penrose is so alluring that critics travel great distances to appreciate its wonders; and one reviewer, having tasted a meal of perfection such as he cannot imagine ever encountering again, is content to make an attempt on his own life. Tuck in.
Delicious starts on Sky 1 on Dec 30