S J Clarkson (2010)
Food and drink brand names from the 1960s and 1970s form a kind of refrain in the culinary writer and broadcaster Nigel Slater’s childhood memoir Toast. Reminders of the colour and design of sweet wrappers etc are essential to the descriptive texture and a special pleasure for those of us who thought we’d forgotten them. She’s probably much younger than Slater and me but S J Clarkson, the director of the screen adaptation of the book, seems to recognise the particular appeal of this remembrance of things past: in the opening credits, the names of the cast and crew appear on familiar tins and packets on the shelves of a grocery shop, Clarkson’s own name on the grocery’s weighing scales. She and the screenwriter Lee Hall can’t find any way to follow this through, though. They were probably right to dispense with extracts from the book as voiceover: Slater’s prose is so painfully funny it would likely have upstaged nearly everything on the screen. But his voice and the food litanies turn out to be irreplaceable – without them, much of Toast is bland and untextured.
The subtitle of Slater’s memoir is ‘The Story of a Boy’s Hunger’ and the rich mix of desires is sustained throughout the narrative of his early life in Wolverhampton, then (to his horror) rural Worcestershire. He repeatedly illustrates the social cachet of products, including his factory owner father’s firmly arbitrary distinctions between the acceptable and the infra dig:
‘Tomato ketchup has never set foot over our threshold, unlike Burgess’s Mushroom Ketchup with which Dad is besotted, especially on bacon and, of course, on his grilled mushrooms. He says it makes them more mushroomy. Salad cream is permitted in summer and even in the bottle, yet Daddies Sauce is unspoken of and HP Sauce is considered lower than almost anything you can think of, lower even than Camp Coffee. This, from a man who drinks Mateus Rosé. … Tea is never, ever Typhoo or Brooke Bond. PG Tips is beyond the pale and the monkeys in drag who advertise it haven’t helped. Tea in our house is Twinings. Pity he calls it Twinnings as in winnings. …’
There’s next to nothing of this in the film[1]. The book is divided into many short chapters, mostly with a food or drink title, often recounting a particular incident in Slater’s boyhood. The screen Toast does replicate this structure, especially at the start, but to thinner and weaker effect. An early reenactment of one of Nigel’s mother’s culinary mishaps is no more than a forced comedy sketch. That’s a fair description of quite a few sequences to follow.
To make matters worse, Clarkson and Hall are sometimes insensitive to the implications of inventions or adjustments they’ve made to the original. They hint at Nigel’s father’s worries that his son’s appetites aren’t those of a normal ‘healthy’ boy. Soon afterwards, they describe a family outing that sees little Nigel partnering his mother on the dance floor while his father sits on the sidelines, not batting an eyelid – even though this is just the kind of thing that would make him more suspicious about the boy’s masculinity. (The sequence serves a dual future purpose: after his mother has died, Nigel will have a fantasy based on their waltz together; when he takes up with Joan Potter, the wicked witch of Slater’s story, the father will change his confirmed non-dancing ways.) More upsettingly wrong is an episode that takes place shortly before the mother’s death, from asthma, when Nigel is nine years old. She suggests they make mince pies – surprisingly early, ten days before Christmas. In the book, the suggestion comes out of the blue. Nigel and his mother prepare the pastry, only for her to discover she forgot to buy any mincemeat; furious, he shouts at her, before running upstairs and slamming his bedroom door shut, ‘You’re HOPELESS, I hope you DIE’. His mother does just that, a couple of nights before Christmas. In the film, the mother’s mince pie offer comes immediately after a scene in which Nigel recognises, and his father mournfully confirms, the seriousness of her illness. When his search for mincemeat in the kitchen cupboard proves fruitless, Nigel sobs, his mother comforts him and he then pronounces, not impulsively, his terrible death wish. Clarkson and Hall seem oblivious to the shocking difference this makes.
It’s an added frustration that the well-cast main adult actors are constrained by the script and direction, especially Ken Stott as Nigel’s father – actually Tony Slater but renamed Alan here. Stott’s Alan is, with very few exceptions, either angry or tearful: the father in the book is those things too but with so much more between the extremes. Still, Victoria Hamilton is touching as Nigel’s permanently anxious mother and Matthew McNulty pretty well perfect as the Slaters’ short-lived gardener Josh, a good-looking, dodgy, free spirit, whom Nigel (Oscar Kennedy) adores. The film changes with the advent of Helena Bonham Carter as the determined gold-digger Joan Potter (real name Dorothy Perrens), who enters the Slater household as the widowed Alan’s cleaner and ends up his second wife. What’s remarkable is that Bonham Carter is the one actor in Toast who’s thoroughly miscast yet she changes it for the better.
If you drew up a list of actresses naturally unsuited to playing a brassy Brummie, Helena Bonham Carter would have to come near the top. Essentially posh, she hasn’t an uncultured bone in her body – certainly not in the structure of her lovely face. In a blonde wig and crude-coloured dresses tight enough to give her a semblance of heftiness, Bonham Carter is slumming it as Joan. Yet she’s game for the role, charismatic and so comically resourceful that she focuses and invigorates Toast. There are negative sides to this. It’s partly because one has become resigned to how weak the film is compared with the book that Bonham Carter’s miscasting doesn’t seem to matter and her vitality is welcome. As well as livening up proceedings, she also lightens the story. The book’s Joan is Nigel’s deadly enemy: one of the startling strengths of Slater’s memoir is how his hatred of this woman is undiminished by the passing of time. The film’s Joan has nothing like the same malign weight – largely because one is so aware that Helena Bonham Carter is doing an enjoyable turn.
Bringing Toast to the screen has involved some almost inevitable paring and rebalancing of the book’s elements. Slater keeps references to his two, much older brothers to a minimum. The film omits them entirely so that Nigel seems like an only child; since he’s certainly a lonely child, this makes emotional sense. Other omissions and alterations are more puzzling. Nigel’s father dies suddenly while mowing the lawn (rather than playing tennis) but there’s been hardly any earlier evidence of his horticultural passions (‘The greenhouse was my father’s sanctuary’): a few shots of Alan tending his beloved begonias would have been a simple way of injecting a bit more nuance into the film’s portrait of him. Teatimes at the home of Warrel Blubb (another pseudonym, presumably), Nigel’s best, perhaps only friend at junior school in Wolverhampton, are a visual gift to a film-maker:
‘Every one of Warrel’s teas ended with a plate of biscuits and cake. There were chocolate chip cookies and Cadbury’s Fingers, Jammie Dodgers, Bourbon biscuits and Jaffa Cakes, slices of home-made Victoria sponge and chocolate digestives. …’
What’s more, Warrel’s adoring mother ‘never offered me so much as a biscuit’. S J Clarkson includes a couple of sequences of Warrel (Frasier Huckle) scoffing while Nigel is empty-mouthed but Warrel is eating a single item of confectionery – there’s no sign of the daily spread or of his outrageously inhospitable mother.
The abridgement of Slater’s text occasionally serves to intensify a theme The obvious example is the escalating cookery contest between Nigel and Joan. When the teenage Nigel starts home economics lessons at school on a Wednesday afternoon, Joan makes Wednesday her most culinarily productive day of the week, which is saying something. Clarkson includes a couple of amusing montages to illustrate the relentless abundance of her efforts. This way-to-a-man’s-heart competition supplies a strong narrative line (Nigel is convinced it’s a way-to-a-man’s-heart-attack strategy on Joan’s part). It also supplies a neat bridge to Nigel’s getting a weekend job in the kitchen of a local pub. A less obvious, though thematically related, example concerns Nigel’s largely thwarted efforts to get close to his father. The film barely indicates the physical aspect of this but its effective use of Dusty Springfield songs on the soundtrack is particularly striking when Nigel, shortly after his mother’s death, cooks smoked haddock for his father’s evening meal. (Alan gets in much later than usual or expected. He pretends to enjoy the wrecked fish but doesn’t fool Nigel.) The accompanying Dusty song is ‘I’ll Try Anything’[2] – interesting when the smoked haddock episode is pre-Joan.
It’s hardly surprising the film is sexually cautious compared with the book. Nigel Slater’s story contains some physically explicit details involving his boyhood self that would be very tricky to show on screen. Partly as a consequence, it’s no surprise either that the film’s protagonist is less complexly unorthodox. During one of the food montages, Nigel turns from the pre-adolescent Oscar Kennedy into the teenage Freddie Highmore. The latter plays intelligently but you miss the younger boy’s greater eccentricity and expressiveness. The change of actor mirrors the relatively conventional interpretation of Nigel’s sexuality, as he progresses to the nursery slopes of gay love with Stuart (Ben Aldridge), son of the owners of the pub where Nigel works. In a concluding leap forward in his professional progress, the hero is interviewed for a job at the Savoy in London by a chef played by the real Nigel Slater. He speaks the final line of the script, to himself in the form of Freddie Highmore: ‘You’ll be fine, you’ll be just fine’ This line ends the book too though its context there is very different[3]. It’s nice that Slater has the last word and a relief that the film of Toast ends up being as watchable as it is. It’s short rations, though, beside his exceptionally memorable memoir.
15 August 2018
[1] I’ve labelled it a television piece in deference to the IMDB ‘TV movie’ categorisation. In this country, Toast was first shown on BBC in December 2010 but it received a theatrical release overseas and was screened at the Berlin Film Festival in 2011.
[2] ‘You belong/To somebody else and not to me/Right or wrong/That’s not the way that it’s gonna be/I want you so much inside/I’m throwin’ away all my conscience and pride, and/I’ll try anything to get you/I’ll do anything I can/I’ll try anything to get you/I’ll cheat and I’ll lie/And I’ll try ’til I die/’Til I make you my man …’
[3] In the book, Nigel gets a job at the Savoy Grill. Outside the Savoy, he tells ‘an old guy emptying rubbish bins in the dark’ that he doesn’t have anywhere to stay:
‘”Best thing you can do is walk up to Piccadilly Circus and stand outside Swan & Edgar’s,” [the old man] said. “There will be someone who’ll ask you if you want a bed for the night soon enough.”
“What, just like that?” I asked.
“Yes, son,” he smiled. “You’ll be fine, you’ll be just fine.”