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Business, Enterprise & Management

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    ‘Common Sense Slimming’ - How the contribution of Joan Robins, television’s ‘afternoon cook’, was not the perfect-fit for the culture of the BBC in the 1950s
    (SAGE, 2022-05-18) Geddes, Kevin
    Cooking on television after WWII mainly addressed ‘the housewife’ audience, while women themselves were presenting television cooking programmes. History has largely forgotten the presenter Joan Robins, who appeared alongside Philip Harben and Marguerite Patten on BBC broadcasts of the late 1940s and 1950s. Robins specialised in ‘common-sense’ cookery, nutrition, and health, including a controversial slimming programme that featured advice that was later disputed by the British Medical Association. Robins’ ideas and innovations were not always welcomed by the BBC, who preferred more straightforward cookery demonstrations, resulting in her turning her back on broadcasting to concentrate on her other careers.
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    “Accompanying the series”: Early British television cookbooks 1946-1976
    (Taylor and Francis Group, 2023-06-22) Geddes, Kevin
    This paper provides a historical analysis to demonstrate the connections and developmental links which emerged between cookbooks and television in Britain after World War II, focused on television broadcasts in the period 1946 and 1976. In this paper, I discuss how early presenters of British television cookery programmes, and their publishers, had vision and marketing skills which enabled links between visual and printed media, and established a pattern of connected cookbook and television production which is taken for granted today. I examine the connected television and publishing careers of three early British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) television cooking pioneers: Marguerite Patten, Philip Harben and Fanny Cradock, who collectively dominated on-screen cooking programmes from the late 1940s until the mid-1970s. By analyzing their cookbooks, particularly their jackets and promotional materials, and interpreting archival research conducted in the BBC Written Archives and other documentary archives, their contributions will be discussed alongside the development of the television-connected cookbook in Britain. I conclude that these television cooks and presenters made a significant contribution on and off our screens during that period which established the connection between television cooking programmes and cookbooks in Britain.