While Fanny Cradock berated Margaret Thatcher for wearing `cheap shoes and clothes', wrote off Eamonn Andrews as a `blundering amateur', and famously was forced to apologise for insulting another TV cook, her cookery programmes - which she presented in evening gown, drop ear-rings, pearls, and thick make-up, booming orders to her partner Johnnie, a gentle, monocled stooge who was portrayed as an amiable drunk - were watched by millions. They were hugely influential: the Queen Mother told Fanny that they were `mainly responsible' for the improvement in catering standards since the war; Keith Floyd declared that `she changed the whole nation's cooking attitudes'; for Esther Rantzen `she created the cult of the TV chef'. Lavishly illustrated, this is a fun, entertaining portrait of this infamous woman.