OBITUARY AA Gill

OBITUARY

AA Gill

AA Gill was headhunted by The Sunday Times in 1993, serving as its television critic and restaurant reviewer until his death, winning many awards along the way

Witty and acerbic Sunday Times restaurant and TV critic whose early years were lost in a haze of drink

For more than two decades AA Gill was the most influential restaurant and TV critic in the country. His waspish tongue — given a platform every week in The Sunday Times — spared no one. “Anyone wanting praise should speak to their mother,” he once said.

Sometimes there were consequences, as when he and Joan Collins were ejected from their table in 1998 by a furious Gordon Ramsay, after a poor review. Yet Gill was unruffled. “I review restaurants,” he said. “Not chefs.”

When the chef complained of “vindictive, emotional and personal criticism”, Gill countered that Ramsay was “a wonderful chef, just a really second-rate human being”.

On another occasion he was collared by a man in the street who yelled: “You owe me £500,000! You closed down my restaurant. Your review was malicious.” Gill had to be reminded which restaurant it was before responding: “It was an unbelievably shitty restaurant, the food was disgusting.”

Though secretaries at The Sunday Times received on his behalf numerous tokens of disapprobation — from dog excrement to tampons — Gill never dwelt on the outcomes of his reviews. “I don’t take credit or responsibility,” he said.

Lean and caddishly handsome, he had a touch of the dandy about him — especially after he took to wearing a monocle. An odd mixture of slightly shy and vaguely camp, it was hard to stay cross with him, even when at his most acerbic.

His talents were wide-ranging and his ability to spin out entertaining anecdotes encompassed a dizzying array of features and travel writing. To the disbelief of some he was so severely dyslexic that he had to dictate everything he wrote and only became a journalist at the age of 38 after more than a decade lost to alcohol. He was disarmingly frank about it and claimed that he could remember only fragments of his twenties. “I feel like a Martian, an outsider”, he said, and his urge to accumulate columns and pieces of trivia was really driven by a “pathetically small and dormitory-sad” inferiority complex.

Gill’s review formula remained unchanging. Restaurants were chosen by him, “the Blonde” — his partner, the journalist Nicola Formby — or an editor. “The only people who don’t ever choose are PRs,” he decreed. He insisted that he “always” paid his own way (on a company card); never booked under his own name — “unless I’m not reviewing and want to get a table”; and took friends so that he experienced a restaurant as a reader would. He also never made notes. If he was recognised “everything gets much worse” — normally there was a huge gap between the starter and main course while the chef cooked it again.

His pet hates — as regular readers became aware — were many: truffle oil, fat people, dinner parties, Christmas dinner, coulis, gastropubs (“Food and pubs go together like frogs and lawnmowers,” he said), Tex-Mex, warm salads, nutritionists (“a non-discipline”), seasonal eating (“the whole march of agrarian history has been a half-famished marathon to overcome the tyranny of the seasons”) and vegetarians. Restaurants that served multi-cuisines were “Jabberwocky cooking”. His two worst meals were Danish wind-dried lamb that “tasted like rancid sheep fat eaten out of the kitchen sink”; the other was African bullfrog cooked in the sand in Botswana, which “tasted like wet, fishy newspaper”.

PRs remained “the head-lice of civilisation”. He ran into hot water with the Commission for Racial Equality after describing the Welsh as “loquacious, dissemblers, immoral liars, stunted, bigoted, dark, ugly, pugnacious little trolls”. A friend said that he could silence a dinner party with his foul language. He once championed whale meat and in 2009 sparked outrage after he claimed to have shot a baboon on safari to “get a sense of what it might be like to kill a stranger”.
Yet he could be equally spiky about his own profession. “In the range of things you can be good at, being a food or TV critic is not way up there,” he said. He admitted that he only became a critic because, “like everything that has happened in my life, I’ve always ended up doing things because I couldn’t do something else”. He wasn’t being entirely fair to himself in this. Although his eloquent voice and slight issue with pronouncing the letter R led some to assume that he was “something vile out of Wodehouse”, he had led a much more rounded and eclectic life than this characterisation allowed.

Adrian Anthony Gill was born in 1954 in Edinburgh to Michael Gill, the television director (obituary, October 29, 2005), and Yvonne Gilan, an actress who became a public-speaking teacher to businessmen. Both were left wing and cut a glamorous dash in postwar Edinburgh. His mother appeared in Fawlty Towerswhen Gill was a teenager. “She showed me the script and I said, ‘This is terrible!’ That was my first piece of criticism.”

He was deeply fond of — and shaped by — his father, who told him Greek and Nordic myths as bedtime stories. He said that they shared “the insecure curse of the English”, which drove in both of them an obsession with collecting trivia. His father had once been nicknamed “the Prof” in the RAF and, as Gill recalled, “all his life he was never further than five steps from a book”. He also smoked a pipe and carried a handkerchief that would be produced to wipe snot and tears from Gill’s face as a boy. Gill later dedicated a book to his father “who brought the world home with him and laid it at the foot of my bed.”

The family moved to London with his father’s BBC posting and lived in a red-brick house. Gill’s seemed a happy childhood, shared with a younger brother, Nick. “I was loved, I was fed and shod, I was valued and listened to,” he said. Yet there was a sadness, somehow “it felt lonely and lost”. He was a “weedy skinny boy” and “moderately bullied”. He also developed a stammer “like a fairytale curse”. His parents fought and also took lovers. “Their marriage wasn’t so much an open marriage as a draughty one,” he later wrote.

Aged nine, Gill discovered that he was also “word blind”. His mother sent him to a “progressive” co-educational boarding school, St Christopher School, in Letchworth — or, as Gill later described, an “odd vegetarian Quaker hippy school”. There he was told he was stupid: “In the end I just checked out.” Pupils grew their hair long and there was no uniform. Gill tended vegetables and kept cows. He found maths “inexplicable”; adored George Orwell, Albert Camus and Mervyn Peake; and listened to the Doors and Cream. Increasingly he got drunk and took drugs. “I was a member of the awkward squad, always arguing.” He would walk the two miles to the local pub and kiss girls in the graveyard. His first girlfriend, aged 18, was a New Yorker staying with the Gills in London. She took him to bed and promised: “We will do everything — at least once. We’ve got all summer.”
After school Gill decided to become an artist and began at Central St Martins, where “the momentum of hedonism” took hold. He left and flitted between jobs — for a year he found himself working in a dirty bookshop in Soho where he bagged up “Swedish nymphos hard at it and boarding school tarts”. He said he loved the Soho pubs, full of bitter, drunk men in tweed. He went to Slade School of Fine Art for a stint and wore Dr Martens boots and a biker jacket and smoked dope. He once got so drunk that he was distressed to wake up grasping the breast of an enormously fat woman after a party — “really, really Botero big”. He calculated that he spent £40 a week on a booze, when his income was £19: “I always had very accommodating girlfriends.”

As he spiralled into alcoholism he met Cressida Connolly, the journalist and writer who became his first wife, in the Lindsey Club where he hung out with Alexander Trocchi, the Scottish novelist and junkie, and Kit Lambert, manager of the Who. He said that Connolly brought him a warm milk and brandy in the bath one day and promised: “You know, if we get married, I’ll always make sure there’s beer in the fridge.” They lived in Wandsworth, of which he could recall little — not the chairs nor the colour of the tea towels. Connolly finally left him in the middle of a dinner party. “I can’t remember what I said or what she said.” He couldn’t even remember who else was present, just crumpled napkins and “stricken stilton”.

There followed a spell living on his own and falling into bed (which he also once shared with a pigeon) with different women until one day he fell on his chin on a wet, cold pavement in Earls Court. Aged 30, he was told that his lifestyle would kill him. He was yellow with hepatitis and drinking vodka and Benylin through a straw. He also wet himself. It was his beloved father who took him to rehab — Clouds House, in Wiltshire — with a basket of pork pies and gave him a last bottle of vintage champagne and a hug. Gill spent six weeks there before returning to London and his first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. Ever afterwards he drank water at parties. In 2015 he wrote a moving memoir, Pour Me: A Life. It described his blackouts and the random nature of his life as a drunkard. “Pockets were a constant source of surprise — a lamb chop, a votive candle, earrings, notes written on paper and ripped from books,” he wrote. “Morning pockets were like tiny crime scenes.”

During the late Eighties, as he adjusted to a life of sobriety, Gill continued to paint. “I tried lots of things — portrait painting, murals, illustration — and I could just about make a living but it really wasn’t going anywhere.’’ Instead, he turned to teaching cookery classes to support his new family. In 1990 he married Amber Rudd, now the Conservative home secretary and then a venture capitalist, and they had a son and daughter: Flora and Alasdair. “She was starting a company. I was happy to stay at home, to draw and write and cook.”

Gill had cooked as a student to save money for beer and later found it therapeutic — “four and 20 black thoughts baked in a pie,” he once quipped. It was something that his much more practical wife never suffered from, he added. He enjoyed the rituals of folding, peeling and plucking and began to buy 10p cookery books from charity stores — treasuring the notes by former owners in the margin, such as “use apricot instead”.

In his memoir he claimed that he never had any idea that Rudd was destined for politics. “I’m very careful. I know that anything I say about her and me, however benign, would be a hostage to fortune . . . Thankfully I don’t have an opinion about fracking. The truth is I adore Amber. We’re still close friends and she’s been the most amazing mother to our two children.”

Through one of his cookery students he was asked to write an account of his detox for Jane Procter, editor of Tatler. His first journalistic foray was a critique of himself, he later joked. Procter said that she cried when she read it and Gill was soon called upon for regular recipes. He enjoyed the largely female Tatleroffice in the 1990s as “immensely good, harmless and most importantly, pointless fun”. They shouted over the desks about rules on one-night stands or whether it was acceptable to wear cufflinks with a precious stone at lunch.

Gill was headhunted by The Sunday Times Style magazine in 1993 — for which he once had to spend a day walking around London dressed as Mr Darcy. His first feature was on English parties in the Highlands. Andrew Neil, the paper’s editor, asked him to become the TV critic in the style of Clive James. The column ran for the rest of his life. Gill said that he replied yes immediately “because I’d have said yes to anything, but also because I love television”. He had, after all, been raised in a household that shaped the medium. “I’ve grown up with television. We are almost exactly the same age. I’ve known all my life that this is the defining art of our time . . . My father made television, my mother is an actress, and my brother a chef. Everything was argued about over dinner. Every idea and opinion had to be justified. We sharpened our opinions on each other like blades on a leather strop. So here I am, sitting in judgment on all three of their professions, every Sunday. Make of that what you will.”

Sunday nights were firmly saved in his diary for watching the small screen and whipping television stars with his tongue. He generated headlines when in 2012 he described the historian Mary Beard as too ugly for television.

He was soon begging to become the paper’s restaurant critic. He said that he “made such a nuisance of myself, I got a letter from the deputy editor that said, ‘Dear Adrian, fuck off.’ ” Eventually he was given that job too; colleagues joked that they struggled between wanting to recognise Gill as a new star and feelings of sheer envy. They thought he would never keep it up. Yet, he did. Once, when an editor asked him to write to a tight deadline, Gill said that he would but only if they sent him a puppy: “What breed?” was the reply. A parson russell duly arrived.

Gill once remarked that “the abiding pleasure of my life so far has been the opportunity to travel”. He was first asked to do a piece on famine in Sudan. He recalled taking sandwiches in his pockets from Nairobi. Upon his return, an editor passed him in a corridor at work saying: “Turns out a restaurant critic is exactly the person to send to a famine.”

Commissions to write about everything from war in Iraq to cataract operations in Ghana followed. He once even raced Jeremy Clarkson (his fellow columnist and close friend) along the Boulevard of Martyrs in Baghdad. He claimed that he was not so much a foreign correspondent as a “disaster tourist” — because he largely stayed in five-star hotels.

Gill also wrote a book about the Ivy restaurant — one of his favourite places — and several novels that received terrible reviews. Describing what he thought made him different as a writer, he once explained: “When I joined The Sunday Times the people I was competing with were all 10 or 15 years younger, they had double firsts from Oxford or Cambridge, and were as bright as new pins. But I’d spent that 15 years wetting myself and getting into fights and living a sort of subterranean life, but it meant I had had 15 years more experience — which was incredibly useful, and meant that I just wrote better than they did . . . It has very little to do with grammar and everything to do with knowing.”

In 1995 he surprised everyone by leaving Rudd for Formby. They met when she contacted Gill about opening a restaurant; she later wrote a column called “Blonde Date” for Tatler. On the party circuit they were hailed as a glamorous new “super couple” — although he claimed to feel more shambolic than anything and hated seeing photographs of his “goofy” grin. He regularly hinted at their healthy sex life in his reviews and once described her as “drop-dead, table-banging, foot-stomping, forehead-corrugating, eyeball-inflating, hubba-hubba, wolf-whistling sensational”.

There was a period of great sadness in 1999 when his younger brother Nick, a chef, vanished. He left a note reading, “I’m having a miserable time. I’m going to disappear for a bit.” Speaking years later, Gill insisted that he never thought of him as dead: “I like to think of him as being somewhere out in the world.”

He sought comfort in his domestic life. With Formby, in 2007, he had twins, Edith and Isaac (he claimed that when he registered their birth he sneaked in extra names, Pyramus and Thisbe). By then he said that more often than not he liked to leave parties by 11.30pm and cook quiet suppers. “It’s a bit of a relief actually, as you get older.” He worked in a glass-walled study off the kitchen in their Fulham house and was hands on in caring for his children. Remaining fond of his first two wives, he showed them edits of his memoir. In the book he joked: “It’s not for me to say if I’ve been a good father; that’s between the kids and their respective therapists.”

Gill rarely ate in the day, to save an appetite for dinner. He wrote fuelled by coffee and, until his forties, cigarettes. Apart from keeping slim he claimed not to spend time on his looks and hated his teeth: “I just shower, shave and go,” he said. Clothes, however, were important. “Fussy closet gay, middle-aged man having a crisis” was how he described his style. He had two tailors who serviced his “kilt fetish” and a penchant for lining his suits with ladies headscarves.

He collected a treasure trove of curiosities from his travels. His house was littered with two finches preserved in salt from the Kalahari, the kneecaps of a medieval child, a stuffed hoopoe and Haitian voodoo dolls — “things that don’t go anywhere”. Or, as he might say in darker moments, “props for a character I don’t really have”. He admitted that he sometimes could not stop himself from offering general knowledge to tourists: “The collecting of pub quiz information is an intellectually insecure nervous tic.”

It still took him three weeks to read a novel and he could not spell. “I couldn’t tell you what an adjective is,” he once said. “People tell me over and over again but it just refuses to go in.” Menus presented a challenge. “I read hugely, just very slowly.” He wrote in his own form without paragraphs or capital letters and then dictated all his copy. The Sunday Times employed a copytaker for whom he developed a nostalgic fondness. As a conversationalist he was noted for his hypnotic sentences: “The closer you can make writing to speech the better, I think, so that it sounds like someone telling you an anecdote.”

He continued to work with energy even during his illness. “I don’t ever want to retire — Bill Deedes [the long-serving former editor of the Telegraph] is the patron saint of columnists. I want to go on doing this for ever,” he said. Of current food fads he was, of course, dismissive: “You get good at cooking one thing 20 times, not 20 things once.”

In his memoir he apologised for the lack of his usual humour and concluded: “I misused a life for 30 years and I had 30 more of a second chance that I used better, though not as well as I might. I found a corner to work in where I never imagined there would be space for me and I’ve made a living by watching television, eating in restaurants and travelling.” He recently surprised those he was closest to when he said that he was a Christian.

It was typical of his good manners to make light of his impending death. He revealed the extent of his cancer to readers in his Table Talk column on November 20, 2016, at the same time that he announced that he and Formby were to marry: “In truth, I’ve got an embarrassment of cancer, the full English. There is barely a morsel of offal not included. I have a trucker’s gut-buster, gimpy, malevolent, meaty malignancy.”

In elegant, tailored pyjamas at the Charing Cross Hospital where he was having chemo, he described how he could no longer ride his bike or drive — although he joked that Clarkson said the latter had nothing to do with illness.

Though the end came sooner than he expected — with him still hoping to marry Formby — he did manage to time things well in another respect. His final piece for the Sunday Times Magazine appeared the day after he died. It mused in a typically Gill-like way on the “middle-class, sheltered uncombative” life he had led and closed with him wondering how his pain compared with that of other “more manly men”.

AA Gill, writer and critic, was born on June 28, 1954. 

He died on December 10, 2016, aged 62