Two Fat Ladies

I am watching Julie & Julia this evening and it made me think of Two Fat Ladies.



These two British ladies were great, and it was their show that originally got me hooked on the Food Network. Their series aired on BBC, but Food Network reran it in the late 90s. They were genuine, unabashed, and endearing all at the same time. They travelled in a motorcycle and side car (with tag N88 TFL – reference to the bingo call for 88 and obviously the initials for Two Fat Ladies) and ended several episodes telling tales while Jennifer Paterson had a drink and a cigarette. I loved to hear their conversations as they cooked because they were very opinionated and never politically correct. They definitely were not high-brow, which made me like them all the more.




If you have never heard of these ladies, you should check out the video clips on YouTube. They are definitely worth looking up. I wish Food Network would run the series again.

What's Your Guilty Pleasure?

I have lots of guilty pleasures – crunchy cheetos, going to the theater and watching two movies back-to-back, and watching a week’s worth of Days of Our Lives over the weekend to name a few.

In fact, Days of Our Lives is a little like comfort food to me. It hits the spot at the end of a long hard week. I’ve been watching it for more years than I care to admit…hence the guilty pleasure. I’ve never scheduled my day around it (thank heaven today for DVRs!), but I would get to watch it every summer vacation when I was in school. And it just happened to be on late enough in the afternoon that my college schedule didn’t interfere.

I think I was definitely hooked when Bo Brady entered the picture, but that show has just the right mix of drama and campiness to keep you coming back. They practically invented the supercouple – Bo and Hope, Patch and Kayla, John and Marlena, Jack and Jennifer, and so on. You also can’t deny the allure of Marlena’s demonic possession, all of the DiMera shenanigans, the Salem Strangler, and the Salem Stalker to name a few.

One of the great things about Days is that they tend to keep the same actors for longtime characters. They don’t have much of a revolving door, and it makes all of those flashback scenes work much better when they’re real. It’s always disappointing to see a flashback scene that has been manufactured with bad makeup, wigs, and a cloudy lens that is supposed to make you think it wasn’t recorded last week. Since Bo Brady hooked me, I love to see those mid-80s flashbacks of Bo and Hope.

What’s your guilty pleasure?