Britain remembers Film Director Mike Hodges and his movie masterpiece : 'Get Carter'

Mike, who died at the age of ninety 90 in 2022, had a long and varied career in the media as a screenwriter, television director, playwright and novelist, but it was, at the age of thirty-nine in 1971, as the director of the big screen movie, 'Get Carter', that he will best be remembered. (link) 

The creation of the film was coloured by his life-changing experience of two years National Service in the Royal Navy which left him highly critical of the corruption in 1970's Britain and and its execution, by the skills and working methods Mike had gained from his earlier career in television.

Mike made the jump from writing scripts for TV advertising to film director when, in 1969 he directed an episode for 'ITV Playhouse', 'Suspect' in which a proud woman coldly concentrates on keeping up appearances when her 50-year old husband and a young schoolgirl go missing at the same time. The following year came 'Rumour' in which a hard-bitten newspaper reporter is drawn back into the world of sleaze he had hoped to have left behind.

Mike recalled : "In those days there were only three television channels so the audiences were huge. Consequently your profile could, if all went well, be pretty high. Feature producers watched out for any emerging talents. Presumably because they were cheaper than established directors but also because there was a certain kudos to finding new contenders". He was spotted by Michael Klinger who had earlier spotted Roman Polanski who made his first English films, 'Cul-de-sac' and 'Repulsion' with him. Mike said : "When Klinger sent me 'Jack’s Return Home', a novel by Ted Lewis, and asked if I wanted to adapt and direct it as a feature film, I couldn’t resist".  

"It rang all sorts of bells with me because Jack Carter, he's going up North to investigate the dubious death of his brother. The were scenes in pubs and clubs and lots of strange places that I recognised from my days in the Navy. So I knew instinctively the kind of milieu that he was moving in because I was on the lower decks and when you went ashore, all these ports, like Hull and Grimsby, are the kinds of places you ended up in and there was no where that would accept you. So I knew what the man was writing about". Harking back to younger days at sea, when he described himself as a 'passionate socialist', he said : "While not sharing the psychopathology of Jack Carter, I certainly shared his anger".  

 Mike brought the speed with which hed worked in television to the production and writing the script, casting it, finding the locations and shooting it took only 32 weeks. He said : "Michael Caine's name was never mentioned initially. Once he'd seen the first draft, he quickly came round frankly I was surprised because Carter was such a shit. I mean he's such an unpleasant men that I couldn't conceive a star taking the role". Mike spent four days with Michael Caine and his chauffer driven Cadillac, looking at possible film locations and focused on Newcastle and North Shields and began to fit the novel to Newcastle where he said : "As soon as I saw those huge rust-coloured bridges stretching across the Tyne I knew this was Jack’s manor".  

 Mike said that given the deprived nature of the locations they stopped at made him, sitting in luxury in the back of the Cadillac, a little uncomfortable. Without rancour he said that from a total budget of £750,000 : "Michael was paid £100,000 and a big percentage. I got £8,000 for writing and directing and no percentage".

The evidence of social and economic deprivation in the north-east had a profound effect on Mike and he said he : "I found the British very complacent about the state of its community. They were unwilling to face how deep the cancer of the country's class system ran. The corruption that stemmed from such desperate inequality infected society from top-to-bottom; parliamentarians, lawyers, police, media. All had, or wanted to have, their noses, in the money trough. In fact shortly after I'd finished the shoot in Newcastle its mayor and other dignitaries were convicted for taking whopping bribes". 

When it came to the inspired casting of John Osborne, playwright, screenwriter and actor most famous for his 1956 stage play, 'Look Back in Anger' as the gangster Cyril Kinnear Mike said : "My agent at the time was also Osborne’s and, out of the blue, he suggested him.  We met and liked each other.  John’s talent for invective intimated that there was another side to him than the affable playwright. You’re right. Chris Wangler, my brilliant sound recordist, asked for John to project more. I resisted his pleas and simply moved the camera closer. John’s decision to speak quietly was clever. So mundane; so sinister". When it came to playing the card scene he said : "It was the toughest scene I had to shoot. Boxing myself in by setting it in a bay window made it even harder for all concerned. I covered it to the best of my abilities, and being forced to move closer and closer on Kinnear, helped me in the end". (link)

Carter's memorable lines :

To Eric : "D'you know ? I'd almost forgotten what your eyes look like. They're still the same. Piss holes in the snow".

To Cliff Brumby : "You're a big man, but you're out of shape. With me ? It's a full time job. Now behave yourself".

To Albert : "I know you didn't kill him. I know".

Mike was philosophical about the fate of his greatest film and said : "Soon after its release in 1972, the film was banished to the dark shadows of cult status.  It was, after all, not considered a very nice film here in the UK.  But then most of my films have been more appreciated beyond these shores, particularly in the US and France. That changed when, in 2009, the BFI decided to release it again; albeit in a limited way. This time around I think British audiences found the endemic corruption intimated in its every frame more acceptable. By then their rose-tinted glasses were off. We no longer saw our country as a beacon of propriety, and law and order. Our parliamentarians, police, press, the whole damned edifice, had been found to be wanting. They all had their noses in the money trough. The cancer of greed had reached every organ of British society. Maybe, just maybe, Get Carter had been an accidental augury? " 

* * * * * * * * 

Mike was born in Bristol in the summer of 1932 and grew up in a middle class, semi-detached house in a cul de sac, the son and only child of Norah and Graham who worked for the Will's Tobacco Company as a commercial traveler. As a result of the itinerant nature of Graham's work, the family moved to Yeolvil and then to Salisbury and it in that cathedral city that Mike spent his formative years. Norah was a devout catholic and as there was no catholic school in Salisbury, at the age of seven Mike began to attend Prior Park College as a boarder, twelve miles away in Bath. It was here that Mike first became smitten by the movies and recalled : "In the winter and autumn months, there was one film every fortnight, which was an absolutely magical  experience. The first one was 'Top Hat' with Fred Astaire". "You got enamored. It seemed so magical". 

He was five years old and still in school in Salisbury when the movie directors Powell and Pressburger came to film scenes for 'The Return of the Scarlet Pimpernel' at Prior Park School. In later life Mike saw fit to add this to his own 'fascination with the movies' mythology when he said : "I didn't know who they were. Even so I cut some classes and got into terrible trouble, so I could watch what was going on". They obviously chose the school for location because of its Georgian grandeur. As time went on, when at home in Salisbury, he said he secretly sneaked out to watch films at the ABC Regal or Gaumont two or three times a week. In addition, he got involved in school amateur dramatics.

When interviewed in 1998 Mike said of that the school was run by the Irish Christian Brothers : "Who are pretty renowned religious thugs. So it was a curious education really. I escaped from there at the age of fifteen having got to the age of matriculation with a distinction in 'Mathematics' and a credit in 'French'. I had wanted to get into the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts to do the stage management course, but my parents couldn't conceive of me doing anything like that. I mean, I was obsessed by the cinema already. Because I's got this distinction in Mathematics they had decided that I'd be articled to a chartered accountants. That's what I did at fifteen". 

His firm was was the Dickensian sounding 'Fawcett, Brown and Pinniger' and with them until the age of twenty, he had followed a five year correspondence course in accountancy which he said he had "not liked at all" and he qualified at a second take at his exams at the age of twenty-two in 1954. He now had to undertake his two years National Service in the Royal Navy and said : "I  applied to the Navy and got in and to my parents horror turned down a commission as an officer". He did this because that : "I was likely to be stuck in a barracks. So I went on the lower deck which was the most important thing I ever did, probably in my life, because it was a complete revelation to me. A complete education".He served on two mine sweepers, HMS Coquette and Wave and was recognised as an 'Able Seaman' when he left two years later. 

The whole experience had a profound effect on Mike who said : "As a rating, an Ordinary Seamen, I was free to explore every corner of every impoverished fishing port around these Islands. Clad in my bellbottoms, blue collar and white cap, I witnessed scenes of such Hogarthian depravation that I experienced a sort of epiphany. From being a young Tory and recently-qualified Chartered Accountant, I became a passionate Socialist".

It was 1956 and he now went to London and for a time lived off the expenses he got for applying for jobs as a chartered accountant and then got a foot in the door of the new and coming medium of television broadcasting and got a job as a teleprompter using the new American device which came with the advent of commercial and live tv. Mike said : "The advantage was that you worked with every single company - Granada, BBC, ATV. ABC. So you were going round all over the place. It was an immense experience working in a vast studio. Fears fell away. In addition to which you were able to observe so much what was going on. It was an amazing curve for me".In his spare time he now wrote scripts for for TV advertising magazines and made enough money to allow him, after two years, to leave work as a teleprompter. He now became the editor of ATV's 'Sunday Break' which had been designed for a young audience and which he now changed by taking out the music and steering it towards the more serious subjects such as gambling and alcoholism. This was followed by him landing the job as a writer for 'World in Action', the weighty investigative current affairs programme made by Granada Television for ITV and his scripting, at the age of thirty-one, in 1963, 'The British Way of Death'. 

Mike once said :

"Mordant humour has always attracted me. Being indoctrinated a Roman Catholic at an early age has left me with the “grim reaper” as my constant companion. The only way I can cope is to laugh at him". (link)

'Britain is No Country for Old Men' paid tribute to six remarkable women in 2022

Britain says "Farewell" to Beryl Vertue, the Visionary Matriarch who worked in a world of film and television production dominated by men

Britain says "Farewell" and "Thankyou" to the last of Hull's 'Headscarf Heroes', Yvonne Blenkinsop

Wales made and Britain says "Farewell" to the Grande Dame of Television Celebrity Interviewers, Mavis Nicholson

Ireland made, but the World has lost that fearless traveller and much loved writer of travel books, Dervla Murphy

Britain made and the USA has lost Audrey Evans, Creator of 'Staging' for kids with cancer and Ronald McDonald Homes for their moms and dads

Britain has lost and Northern Ireland says "Goodbye" to its fearless May Blood, who fought in a male-dominated world to gain rights and improve the lives of its women

Britain is no Country for Old Men presents its eight most popular obituaries for 2023

Britain says "Farewell" to its Writer, Ronald Blythe, best remembered for his masterly evocation of English rural life in a village called of Akenfield

 

Britain says "Farewell" its last remaining ‘SAS Rogue Hero’, Mike Sadler

Britain's teachers say "Farewell" to their towering beacon of light, the brilliant, charismatic educationalist, Tim Brighouse

Britain says "Goodbye" to cartoonist, Tony Husband, best remembered for his loving portrayal of his Dad's dementia in 'Take Care Son'

Time for Britain to honour and pay tribute to its Master Stone Carver, Rory Young 

Britain says "Farewell" to Kit Hesketh-Harvey, its Master where Words meet Music and joyous Renaissance Man

Britain says "Farewell" to our old and revered, Prince of Film Critics, Derek Malcolm

Britain says "Farewell" to Mik Critchlow, much-loved Photographer of the life and people of a Town called Ashington

Exeter Dementia Action Alliance celebrates its tenth anniversary and the work of cartoonist Tony Husband

The cartoonist, Tony Husband, had a successful career as a cartoonist and was mainly known for his work in Private Eye magazine with his work also appearing in The Times, the Daily Mail and the Sunday Express as well as magazines, including Playboy and The Spectator. In later life Tony's father, Ron, suffered from Alzheimer’s and his gradual loss of memory and move into a care home inspired Tony to draw a few illustrations of an imagined conversation between the two of them. The result became 'Take Care, Son The Story of My Dad and His Dementia', which was published when Tony himself was sixty-four in 2014. (link)

The Exeter 'Cosy Route Project' in 2021 was a community wellbeing and dementia awareness initiative created by the Exeter Dementia Action Alliance to signpost people of all abilities to routes on the edge of the city where they can walk and run. Tony was commissioned to illustrate the 'Cosy Routes around Exeter' and in so doing captured the different character of each of the eight routes. (link)

During the pandemic Tony, working with the founder of the Exeter Dementia Action Alliance, Gina Awad, engaged with a number of family carers affected by dementia to create the book he illustrated, ‘United Caring For Our Love Ones Living With Dementia'. It was published in 2022 and was unique in that it featured real-life stories of people with dementia, told by loved ones. The stories reflected issues like : the impact of receiving a diagnosis; the importance of person-centred care and social inclusion; the power of meaningful engagement, partnerships, and peer support. 

The Exeter Dementia Action Alliance is now ten years old and while marking the occasion to mark the occasion the charitable foundation also took time to remember the cartoonist Tony Husband, who had worked closely with EDAA for seven years. He completed what proved to be his last piece of work for the Alliance before dying of a heart attack two weeks later on London's Westminster Bridge. (link)

Britain says "Goodbye" to its much-loved Hairy Biker, Dave Myers

Dave, who has died at the age of sixty-six, found fame alongside Si King, his best friend and work partner of 30 years as part of the motorcycle-riding cooking duo, the 'Hairy Bikers'. Together, they toured Britain and the world in search of new recipes which they then, with their wit and charm, discovered and imparted to their millions of television followers. 

Dave was born in the port town of Barrow-in-Furness in the historic county of Lancashire in the north of England in the autumn of 1957, the son and only child of Margaret and Jim, a papermill foreman. Dave said : "I was something of a surprise to my parents. My mum, was 42 when she had me and had been told she couldn't have children. So when she went to the doctors, they thought she had an ovarian cyst. And it was me!" 

Motor bikes figured early in Dave's life and he recalled : ”My father used to go to work on a BSA Bantam, when I was about two, three years old I used to toddle down to the bottom of the back street, he’d be there coming home from work, and he’d let me sit on the tank holding on to the handlebars and pretending to ride the motorbike up the back street". He said : “I loved the smell of oil and machinery and rubber; just one whiff would set my pulse racing”.

Back home, of his mother’s cooking he said : “The smell of fresh cakes and pies always filled the room when I was a small boy. It was magic". Unfortunately, his world started to fall apart when he was seven and he had to put his “Mam” to bed after a fall which was the first sign of multiple sclerosis, a disease which would eventually lead to her death. 

Meanwhile, while at Cambridge Street Primary School, he started to suffer from alopecia-related hair loss and was cruelly branded “baldy” and “Uncle Fester” by the other kids. He began to do his paper round with his hood up, using a concoction of chimney soot and Vaseline to cover up the balding areas. He recalled : “One time, I got an air pistol to shoot myself in the knees, just to get a few weeks off school, but I was wearing jeans and I hit the seam, so the pellet didn’t do any damage at all”.

Things improved when he was eight years old. His father was sixty-three in that year, and in his increased spare time, Dave said : "We became inseparable. Our favourite pastime was longline fishing in Morecambe Bay. We'd ride out on his motorbike, attach 100 worms to 100 hooks suspended from a long line staked in the sand, and see what the tide brought in. Sometimes, we'd collect as many as 40 plaice". 

Another happy time was a holiday to see to see the TT races on the Isle of Man, a dream come true for the bike-mad boy who badgered every rider he could, to sign his autograph book. Equally sharp were his memories of the meals at the Metropole Hotel, as he reflected : “Bikes and food were vying for my attention, even then”.

In 'part four' of what was to be his last BBC TV series with Si King, 'The Hairy Bikers Go West', which was aired this week, they visited Liverpool and Wirral, Dave recalled : 

"I once came to Liverpool to stay in a bed and breakfast for a week's holiday when I was a kid. It was funny because they took me on the ferry across the Mersey and when I come back, you know when you do your school diary, me I was always pretentious, I put : 'So Mam and Dad took me on a cruise'. I said we went to New Brighton and they burst out laughing, I was really humiliated. Because I thought the New Brighton ferry was a cruise". To which Si replied : "Well I mean it is, if you want to get to New Brighton that is".

Back in the 1960s, with his mother now in a wheelchair, Dave and his father became her full-time carers. He said : "Bedtimes were the worst. Dad would take her arms, I'd take her feet and we'd bounce her up the stairs. But the first time it hit me that she was really bad was when I was nine. She went to bed and couldn't get up again". Kitchen staples were now tinned mince with mashed potato and marrowfat peas. On one occasion his father mixed them all together and claimed to have created a risotto. Ironically, Dave’s love of food flowered for the first time in this period and he said : “I got tired of my father serving us tinned mince and Smash and peas, so I started cooking myself. It wasn’t a burden. I loved it”.

In 1968, Dave, having passed his 11-plus exam, took his place at the 1930 built Barrow Grammar School for Boys with its stirring school song : Westaway the seas lie open, east away the sun rides high, outward bound in morning glory, free and ready here am I.  It was here that he was taken under the wing of his art teacher, Mr Eaton, who arranged for him to visit the art galleries in Manchester and Liverpool. Dave recalled : "He encouraged me, especially in art club, which we had once or twice a week. I’d do some painting and he’d give me advice and put them up on the wall. He had an incredible imagination and would always broaden my ambition, never stifle it". Money was obviously tight at home and at the age of sixteen Dave said : "I applied to get a job as a photographer after O-levels, but I didn’t get it. It’s just as well because I stayed on and got qualifications in general studies and art".  

By now this was against the background of having to look after both his mother and father, since, when he was seventeen, his father suffered a bad stroke and sometimes fed them fillets of fresh plaice he had caught himself. Dave recalled : "I put Dad in his bed, Mum in hers and wondered : 'What I was going to do ?' When the district nurse came round, she realised I couldn't cope and asked which parent I could manage best ? It was awful to have to choose, but I said Dad because I knew he had a chance of recovery. Mum went into a geriatric ward and never came home again".

By now this was against the background of having to look after both his mother and father, since, when he was seventeen, his father suffered a bad stroke and sometimes fed them fillets of fresh plaice he had caught himself. Dave recalled : "I put Dad in his bed, Mum in hers and wondered : 'What I was going to do ?' When the district nurse came round, she realised I couldn't cope and asked which parent I could manage best ? It was awful to have to choose, but I said Dad because I knew he had a chance of recovery. Mum went into a geriatric ward and never came home again".

At the time he was in the sixth form at school Dave undertook culinary adventures when he created a 'mini curry-club', inviting his friends home after their visit to the pub for some grub, which was concoction created from whatever he found in the kitchen cupboard. Many years later he relived those “30p pub-grub days”, cooking a 'Hairy Bikers' chilli con carne recipe enriched with dark chocolate. (link)

At the age of eighteen he made his way south to London where, when arriving at Euston Station for the first time, he was stopped by police suspicious about the contents of his tobacco tin. With the encouragement of Mr Eaton, he had applied for and now took his place as an undergraduate student studying for a Fine Art degree at Goldsmiths College. In addition to his studies, living and eating in South London broadened his culinary horizons and he discovered the pleasures of south Indian food. 

In his first vacation as a student he recalled : "My first trip abroad was with a mate at the age of 18. My Dad gave me some money, so I booked a package holiday to Paris for £65, but had to hitchhike to Calais because I couldn’t afford the train fare. It was a disaster. I fell out with my mate and got pickpocketed outside the Sacré-Coeur, so I only had £25 to last me the week. But I love art, so I spent my time sitting outside and sketching. I really was a starving artist". For the rest of the holiday he returned to Barrow, to earn money by cleaning out the steelworks’ furnaces during the annual shutdown. It was about this time that he bought his first motor bike, a Cossack Ural Mars Mk III, with a sidecar.

After graduating in 1978, he stayed at Goldsmiths for a further year to study for his master's degree. When his father died, he said : "It was left to me to tell Mum and she was heartbroken. By the time I graduated, I'd lost both parents and twenty-three was a young age to deal with a double loss like that. I felt rootless. I remember clearing their council flat, putting some stuff in storage and tying the rest on to the back of my motorbike. I was like one of the Beverly Hillbillies".

Dave said : "Ambition kept me going" and working on the the principle that : “If I can paint a picture, I can paint a face”, he successfully applied to join, as a trainee, the BBC TV Make-up Department, which he described as : "A vibrant, exciting and caring place". However, the caring element wasn't present on his first day he was ordered "to get a wig" to hide his alopecia. Dave responded by deciding to not spend the money on a wig, which would have cost more than a month’s salary and instead shaved his head and bought himself a nearly new Honda 185 Benly motorcycle. 

As the corporation’s only known male make-up artist, Dave appeared on the cover of the staff magazine 'Ariel' with Hamble, the rag doll from 'Play School'. Before long, he was preparing guests for Blue Peter, arranging Des O’Connor’s copper-tinged highlights and painting Adam Ant’s white stripe for 'Top of the Pops'. 

Gradually he branched out into prosthetics, making casts of Patricia Hodge and Julie Wallace’s breasts for 'The Life and Loves of a She-Devil' in 1986 and when filming finished, attached one of the artificial breasts to the back of the catering truck and watched it being driven away. On another occasion he was called upon to trim Roger Moore's hair when he was filming in Luxembourg. (link)

Going freelance he became a regular make-up artist on 'Coronation Street' before moving on to larger-scale dramas with actors such as John Gielgud. In 1987, when Timothy West played Mikhail Gorbachev in the TV movie 'Breakthrough at Reykjavik' Dave had to replicate the Soviet leader’s famous red birthmark, ensuring it looked exactly the same for each day of filming.

After a brief, misguided foray into making money in the antiques trade, Dave returned to his face paints and at the age of thirty-eight was head of make-up for the Catherine Cookson drama, 'The Gambling Man' in 1995. It was now that he met Simon “Si” King, who was nine years his junior and who he described as : “A big, blond-haired Geordie” even though  he was, in fact, from County Durham. They started their twenty-nine year friendship and hit it off with their shared enjoyment of a curry, a pint and motorbikes and before long were riding and cooking side by side as though they had been childhood friends. 

Dave's health problems had continued into adulthood and his hair thinned even more after a bout of pneumonia and pleurisy. In his personal life when, after the failure of his first marriage, in 1998 Dave became engaged to Glen Howarth, a script supervisor whom he had met during filming of another Catherine Cookson tale, 'The Tide of Life'. However, his life was once again blighted by illness, when four months later she died of stomach cancer. He himself now had an emergency operation to remove a cyst the size of an apple from his brain with the curious side-effect that his hair began to grow back in tufts.

It was six years later, in 2004, when Dave was forty-five, that he and Si, a locations manager on the Harry Potter films, pitched their idea for a TV show focusing on motorbikes and food to the BBC. Dave later said : “It was midlife crisis time and you can’t have more of a midlife crisis than going off on a motorbike”.

Dave recalled : “As soon as we came up with the idea, a lass in the production office just yelled out ‘Hairy Bakers’ and the series was born!” Even so, it was two years before the two burly, hirsute motorcyclists who visited foreign locales, often getting off their bikes to cook by the roadside, would reach the screen. In the first episode of 'The Hairy Bikers’ Cookbook' the pair motored through Namibia, stopping off to cook crocodile satay and oryx rolls. Their culinary travelogue ran across three series and took them to Portugal, Vietnam, Turkey and Mexico. The series was renamed : 'The Hairy Bikers Ride Again' for the third series (link) and 'The Hairy Bakers' for the fourth series. It became such a hit with the viewers that a memo circulated the BBC praising the two men for winning over : “A difficult-to-reach audience” to which Si said : “Basically a ‘difficult-to-reach audience’ translates as ‘normal people’”.

It was in 2009, that Dave and Si firmly cemented their partnership when they hosted a 30-part daytime series for BBC Two, 'The Hairy Bikers' Food Tour of Britain' (link), which aired on weekdays and saw them visit a different county each day and cook what they considered to be that county's signature dish. Dave recalled : “As soon as we came up with the idea, a lass in the production office just yelled out ‘Hairy Bakers’ and the series was born!” 

The following year their six-part series titled 'The Hairy Bikers : Mums Know Best' (link) was aired and invited guests were asked to bring along their favourite family recipes and cooked examples which were compiled for the 'Mums Know Best Recipe Board' for the other mums to copy down. In addition, they were encouraged to bring along their indispensable, old- fashioned, dependable and sometimes unidentifiable kitchen gadgets : potato peelers, soda streams, meat mincers and pastry cutters. 

With their popularity now in ascendance, they were commissioned for a new 40-episode series, 'The Hairy Bikers' Cook Off' (link), which included a cook off between two families and celebrity guests. Then in 2011 they had signed new contracts with the BBC for another new series which saw the two of them doing what they loved best : a 5000 mile gastronomic road trip across Europe, the 'Hairy Bikers' Bakeation' (link). Their mission was to discover the best baking on offer across Europe, from Norway, the Low Countries, Germany, Eastern Europe, Austria, Italy and France to Spain.

(link)

At this stage in his life, Dave said of his school art teacher, Mr Eaton : "I often think about where I’d be if it wasn’t for him. There were three of us in Mr Eaton’s art school gang and we’ve all done alright for ourselves. One became a professional artist and the third is a successful photographer in Hollywood. As for me, he got me into the industry I’m in now. I’ve got him to thank for opening the door to art school, the BBC and for allowing me to do all the bonkers stuff I do now. I’m a very lucky man".

Dave recalled : "I met Lili, my wife, while we were filming 'The Hairy Bikers in Romania'. She was the manager of the hotel where we stayed. As she escorted Si and me up a spiral staircase, I whispered : "Cor, I really fancy her." And he said : "Nah, leave off, mate. She's dead scary". But Lili and I became pen pals and got married in 2011. The cultural difference has never been an issue – we just get on – and she wasn't in the least fazed by the saucy attention I got competing in 'Strictly Come Dancing' In fact, at my age, she thinks it's vaguely ridiculous".

More series abroad followed in 'The Hairy Biker's Mississippi Adventure' (link) and 'The Hairy Bikers' Asian Adventure' (link). Dave recalled that when they were in Japan : "I fell in love with Kyoto, which feels like old Japan, full of elegant temples and waterways. We stayed at a traditional ryokan guesthouse, where you sleep on a futon mat, but we were banned from the bathhouses because we had tattoos. There are lots of rules like that and I found it fascinating culturally". They were, incidentally, warmly accepted at a “sumo stable” in Kyoto, where they trained in loincloths alongside the wrestlers, who consumed 20,000 calories a day.

In 2013, Dave appeared on TV's 'Strictly Come Dancing', performing a “Tartan tango” to the tune of The Proclaimers’ I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles) with his dance partner, Karen Hauer. (link)  He became, in the words of the show’s judge Len Goodman : “The people’s champion”, winning the weekly popular vote despite sometimes low marks from judges and armchair critics deriding his “ungainly boogying”. He didn’t win, but received the longest standing ovation for his Meat Loaf-themed paso doble.(link)

In 2014 with Si, he launched 'The Hairy Bikers Diet Club', which included recipes and tips and tricks to help people to live a healthier and trimmer life, while not starving to be "skinny minnies". In 2015, they co-presented 'The Nation's Favourite Food' on BBC Two alongside Lorraine Pascale.

Dave said, with his usual enthusiasm : “We'd spent two-and-a-half years going around the world investigating other people's cultures. We wanted to get back to our roots and celebrate the food culture we have in Britain. It's just as much an exploration of wonderment for us as it is for the viewers to discover all these local foods. There are some amazing cultural dishes in the UK that have been cooked for hundreds of years that have nearly been forgotten about. We want to revive those great old recipes. Have you heard of Shropshire's fidget pie, for instance? (link)  It's based around gammon and cooking apples with potatoes, sage and onions. Delicious. We've discovered lots of great dishes like that”.

He continued with his eulogy : “In Cornwall, we made proper Cornish pasties at the Edenproject; we have made Malvern pudding, Cheshire cheese soup in the jaguar house at Chester Zoo; Cullen Skink soup in Moray.(link)  In Scarborough we made my mum's Yorkshire pudding with Si's Mam's gravy; in Wales we made Carmathenshire cockles, laver bread and Welsh salty bacon; in Somerset we cooked Somerset chicken, a traditional dish heavy with apples.(link) These are dishes born out of the land and generations of cooks perfecting the recipes”. He said that by the end of the series : "We had ridden 15,000 miles on our motorbikes – a proper food tour of Britain”.

In 2022, Dave revealed that he had been diagnosed with cancer and had been undergoing chemotherapy treatment. (link) He had recovered sufficient strength to handle his motor bike, by the summer of 2023, to take part in this seven-part series for BBC which saw him reunite with Si to make 'The Hairy Bikers Go West'. They traveled together down the west coast of Scotland and through Lancashire, Merseyside, North Wales, Bristol and finally Devon and Dorset.(link)

It was to be, in part, a valediction that took the bikers to places that had shaped them, with Dave even making an emotional homecoming to the county where he was born. Along the way they explored these changing areas through restaurants, recipes and inventive new food entrepreneurs. It was appropriate that they traveled their last 600 miles together on their quest to explore and reveal hidden culinary gems and as usual, the series was replete with recipes : from Chicken Balmoral with truffle mash, poached lobster served with Scottish Bucatini pasta, to Lambchop pakoras with traditional Persian rice and a Lancashire Butter and Potato Pie.

With Dave's passing Si said : 

“I will miss him every day and the bond and friendship we shared over half a lifetime. I wish you God's speed brother. You are and will remain a beacon in this world. See you on the other side. Love ya”.

When once asked how he would like to be remembered ? Dave had replied with perfect self-effacement : 

“Oh, just as a bloke that 'had a go' really. I’ve been lucky enough to do the dreams. And sometimes the nicest thing about our programmes – you look at our shows, and it’s like going away with  your best mate. It takes you out of yourself and you learn a bit and  if people remember that about me, I’ll be well happy".