The World According to Gogglebox Read online

  LEON & JUNE, LIVERPOOL

  JUNE: The only thing I won’t do is eat in front of the television. Well, you’ll see us eating a cracker.

  LEON: Or a cake.

  JUNE: Leon’s weight has become a bit of a running thing.

  LEON: I lost about a stone.

  JUNE: People on Twitter were saying, ‘Stick with it, Leon.’

  LEON: I could do with losing another stone.

  STEPH & DOM, SANDWICH

  DOM: Since I was about twenty, at the end of the day – come six, six-thirty – I like something to take the edge off. A mental symbol that I’m not working any more. A drink is the mark of the end of the day. ‘Right, we can, we can look to do other things now.’ My favourite after-dinner sticky would be a brandy and Benedictine. I don’t have them very often because they are absolutely lethal. And I can never get the mix right. It’s two of one, and one of the other, so it’s a triple shot. It’s just like drinking very strong nectar. Highly recommended. But if you’ve gone through a fairly big evening, and you have one or two of those, that’s it, you’re on a highway.

  Bit hot and cold on gin at times.

  I do a mean Bloody Mary. Absolutely mean. It’s a good morning-after Bloody Mary, though. In the evenings, I don’t usually go that gung-ho because it takes about forty minutes to make it.

  DOM’S BLOODY MARY

  • A large vodka

  • A splash of sweet sherry

  • A splash of dry sherry

  • A couple of drops of whisky (a peaty malt, like Connemara)

  • Tomato juice

  • Worcester sauce

  • Tabasco

  • Celery salt

  • Celery seed

  • Lemon juice

  • Lime juice

  • A tiny drop of Angostura bitters

  • ½ tsp horseradish

  Shake over ice and pour over crushed ice (which has got to melt a tiny bit first).

  LINDA, PETE & GEORGE, CLACTON-ON-SEA

  GEORGE: I’ve never cooked anything off the telly. They won’t let me. If I laid my TV on its back and started frying stuff off it, I’d get in trouble.

  STEPH & DOM, SANDWICH

  DOM: I’ve done a couple of Nigel Slater’s recipes, but his simple ones. And we’ve done a couple of recipes out of Jamie Oliver’s books. We did a poached steak. (He poached it in red wine, naturally.) Which was great. And we ripped the recipe out of the book, thinking, ‘We’ll keep that safe,’ and we haven’t been able to find it since.

  REV. KATE & GRAHAM, NOTTINGHAMSHIRE

  GRAHAM: I had a go at macaroons when I saw them on Bake Off.

  KATE: Graham’s very domesticated.

  GRAHAM: They didn’t look that good, but then I did a photo on Facebook and it was like, ‘It’s all right Graham, they look all right.’ Tasted all right.

  KATE: I quite like coming down the stairs at night in my dressing gown and eating out of the fridge, pretending I’m Nigella. But there’s not very exciting things in our fridge, usually. So I think that I look like her, but actually I just look like a fat person eating trifle.

  SANDY & SANDRA, BRIXTON

  SANDRA: Sandy cooks stuff off the TV.

  SANDY: I watch any kind of cooking programme. But I experiment. Like when they say you do chicken breasts, and you put cottage cheese inside. But I noticed that when they put that in, it all comes out of the sides. It’s all over the joint. So you put Philadelphia in. But not normal Philadelphia, you use the garlic and herbs. And then use your ham thing and wrap round. Such a difference. I’m a cook.

  SANDRA: I’m not.

  SANDY: The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, you know that. If you can cook, your man will love you really forever. Because he knows no matter what, even if he leaves you, he knows that you’re always going to be cooking. So when he’s hungry he can come and find you. I’ve always cooked. Because my mum used to have a restaurant. When she used to go on holidays to the Caribbean, then I used to run it. We used to have all the wrestlers in. Big Daddy’s been there back in the day. It was in Brixton, Tulse Hill. Police Commissioners, people off TV, celebrities, they all used to come. Because she was one of the first Caribbean food restaurants that opened up. That’s why she was known too back in the day.

  THE MOFFATTS, COUNTY DURHAM

  BETTY: I don’t really cook.

  SCARLETT: I’ve ordered food in after I’ve seen it on TV.

  BETTY: That looks nice. Order a pizza.

  SCARLETT: Whenever we watch Man v Food, a pizza ends up being ordered.

  BETTY: We watched one where they had to do a pizza pie, and Scarlett rang Dominos. She was saying, ‘Is there any chance you could make a pizza pie?’ And he was saying, ‘What’s that?’ She went, ‘It’s like a pie, but it looks like a pizza … A pizza pie?’

  SCARLETT: He put us through to Head Office to see if they could help us. But they couldn’t.

  REV. KATE & GRAHAM, NOTTINGHAMSHIRE

  KATE: A nice perk of the dog collar is you very, very rarely pay for beer as a vicar.

  LEON & JUNE, LIVERPOOL

  LEON: Can I have a cracker please, June? A cracker, darling.

  JUNE: No, you can’t.

  LEON: Go on. You’ve got beautiful eyes. I’m lost when I gaze into your eyes. I always was.

  REV. KATE & GRAHAM, NOTTINGHAMSHIRE

  KATE: We’re so middle-class, aren’t we? What’s that scraping sound? It’s my working-class grandfather turning in his grave. I’m going to have gravy and mushy peas for tea, just to counteract it.

  GRAHAM: Put the Prosecco away, then.

  THE SIDDIQUIS, DERBY

  BAASIT: You know bananas are not actually part of the fruit food group. Fifty per cent of our DNA is the same as a banana’s.

  SID: Are you two having a banana? Oh, let’s get two. Banana Buddies.

  LEON & JUNE, LIVERPOOL

  LEON: I’m just going to have this cracker you didn’t bring me.

  STEPH & DOM, SANDWICH

  DOM: Steph can’t stand Nigella Lawson. More to the point, she can’t stand the character – the way she’s portrayed. It’s all soft porn in a kitchen. And I’m sure she’s not like that in real life. It’s as if someone’s rubbing her in places we can’t see to get her to perform like that. There’s a bit of frottage going on somewhere.

  THE WOERDENWEBERS, THE WIRRAL

  EVE: I like Jamie Oliver’s cooking, even though he ruined my school meals. I used to get my meal and I used to get my vegetables and stuff like that, and then I’d get a cookie with chocolate chips. And he replaced ’em with raisins. And he took Turkey Twizzlers away. Jay didn’t like that.

  RALF: My favourite chef is Gordon Ramsay. He is my personality.

  VIV: What? Arsehole?

  RALF: Yeah.

  MASTERCHEF

  STEPH & DOM, SANDWICH

  DOM: Bring back the Galloping Gourmet. Glass of wine in one hand, one for the pot, one for me …

  STEPHEN & CHRIS, BRIGHTON

  CHRIS: The thing is, these programmes, they just make you feel hungry, don’t they?

  STEPHEN: Not when they’re dishing up things that look like fucking shit.

  STEPH & DOM, SANDWICH

  STEPH: Looks like something Gigi just deposited.

  THE GREAT BRITISH BAKE OFF

  STEPH & DOM, SANDWICH

  STEPH: It doesn’t make me want to get up and bake, I must be honest. No. Some other fucker can do it.

  LEON & JUNE, LIVERPOOL

  JUNE: Now, Mary Berry’s got talent. I’ve got her cookery book in the kitchen. My children learnt from it. And it was well illustrated, so they knew what the dish had to look like when it was finished.

  LEON: Our Julie is a better cook than all of them. She got 98% in O-level home economics. They would have given her 100% but they said they couldn’t.

  THE TAPPERS, NORTH LONDON

  NIKKI: Mary Berry’s old-fashioned. Old-school.

  JONATHAN: She puts a towel over
sandwiches.

  THE SIDDIQUIS, DERBY

  UMAR: Mary Berry brings me out in a rash. We were watching Great British Bake Off and I had a severe reaction to something. The doctors still don’t know what it was, but we maintain that it was her. ’Cause the last time we watched it something happened.

  BAASIT: Mary Berry’s a curse on this family actually. Because the time before that we watched her, they couldn’t use any of our footage because something went wrong with the camera.

  UMAR: And the time before that we had a power cut, I’m sure she was on it then. I don’t know. She’s … I think she’s evil in some respects. I think she’s undead.

  SID: I was going to say she resembles a modern-day witch.

  UMAR: Yes, you’re right. She’s one of them white witches.

  BAASIT: She can hear us now. You’ve got to stay quiet about this.

  THE MICHAELS, BRIGHTON

  CAROLYNE: How is Mary Berry so thin when she cooks all those cakes? It’s not fair. If I could be like her and grow to be that age and be doing what she can do, I’d be well impressed with myself. She’s the same age as Elvis.

  SANDY & SANDRA, BRIXTON

  SANDRA: Yeah, I like her. I would love to live like her right now. Tea and cake.

  SANDY: And scones. Or sc-oh-nes.

  SANDRA: And everyone coming round for a cup of tea in the garden, sitting down. Yeah. That’s the kind of life I would like to have.

  SANDY: And nowadays people don’t cook and eat like they used to. And these younger generations, they don’t know how to bake one cake, much less a Victoria sandwich. Unless they learn it once in a year in school. I mean, I can’t bake. But I watch her.

  STEPH & DOM, SANDWICH

  DOM: Sweet old poppet.

  STEPH: She is a Victoria sponge.

  STEPHEN & CHRIS, BRIGHTON

  CHRIS: She comes across as a sweet old lady, but I think she’s a right dirty bitch.

  The Siddiquis

  DERBY

  The Siddiquis are Sid, 69, an environmental manager for the NHS, and his sons Umar, 36, a biomedical scientist, and Baasit, 32, a teacher. Sid and his wife also have two daughters and a third son, Raza, who appears in the show occasionally. They live in Derby.

  HOW DID YOU MEET?

  UMAR: We’re family, obviously, but we lived together for a considerable period of our life. Gogglebox is just an extension of how we talk and interact with each other anyway, it’s just that somebody’s put a camera there.

  BAASIT: What comes across as genuine is the fact that we haven’t just been thrown together for the purposes of this programme. We do know each other very well.

  SID: My son Raza did all of the first series alongside Baasit and Umar. He’s quite hilarious. He’s deadpan and the opposite of me. If I say it’s day outside, he’ll say, ‘No, it’s night.’ That is pretty good because then it gives a chance for us to react to each other, whereas these two, they usually tend to agree with me. But Raza is very, very much, in your face – ‘No, Dad, you’re talking rubbish.’

  BAASIT: Dad used to lie to us. When we were very young, and then a bit older, but a bit thick. Dad used to tell us that he wrote EastEnders or Coronation Street, and he knew what was happening next.

  SID: Because I’d read the magazines.

  BAASIT: We used to believe him as well. We were idiots.

  UMAR: Dad told me that he’d been on This is Your Life. And just presented us with a generic red leather-bound book as the proof.

  BAASIT: We never got to look in it, did we?

  Sid when he was 25 years old, 1974

  Baasit when he was 14 years old, 1994

  Raza (8) and Umar (9) in their school uniforms, and Baasit (4), 1986

  HOW DID YOU GET ON GOGGLEBOX?

  BAASIT: I have a friend who I used to work with in a video shop years ago. She went off to uni and then I just carried on with my life, and then she just randomly sent me an email, out of the blue, and said, ‘You’re a bit of a prat, we’re doing this thing that you might be interested in.’ I said I’d ask Dad and my brothers and see if they wanted to give it a go. And they jumped at the idea. But none of us thought it was going to be on Channel 4 or anything like that.

  SID: We thought, it’s only a small thing, nobody’s going to even notice, we’re not going to become celebrities or anything like that. So that was the perception at that time. But when the second series came, things changed quite a bit, and obviously the third series is just crazy. It’s enormous.

  WHAT DO YOU THINK

  OF YOURSELVES ON SCREEN?

  SID: It’s unnerving. ‘Why do I look like that? Why am I sitting like that? Look at my stomach sticking out. Oh, I shouldn’t be doing that.’ I’ve got this terrible habit of folding my arms.

  Ours isn’t a posh image at all. You only have to look when they show the outside of the house: the bins are stacked up there. It’s a funny thing, because I went to a work conference, and we go round the table to introduce ourselves, and when my turn came and I said, ‘I’m Sid Siddiqui’, somebody else shouted ‘Get those bloody bins out of the scenes.’

  UMAR: It is shocking though, isn’t it? When they do the pan of the house and you can just see wheelie bins. And then they show the posh couple’s house …

  BAASIT: On Twitter, the most negative thing that anyone said about us was that we don’t have necks.

  UMAR: I think it’s because we all sit like this.

  BAASIT: You should change your sofa, man, seriously.

  WHAT WAS YOUR FAMILY’S REACTION?

  SID: My wife wouldn’t want to be on the show. I mean, she’s not fluent in English anyway, so that would be a problem.

  BAASIT: Mum and the sisters … I think they’re our worst critics. In fact, I think it’s one of them who Tweeted that we have no necks.

  BEING RECOGNISED

  BAASIT: It’s weird. You can go through your day-to-day life just absolutely normal: I go to work, I get yelled at by my boss and the kids pick on me and stuff. And then you’d go out in town, when all three of us are together … it’s like Power Rangers. So many people start crowding you.

  BAASIT: And they don’t call you ‘The Siddiquis’, they call you ‘Gogglebox’.

  SID: Actually, people are very kind and respectful. They recognise you, but they don’t want to intrude.

  BAASIT: But when people have had a few drinks, then they feel like they can just ask anything.

  UMAR: When I get approached I’m a bit embarrassed still. I would like to continue to be a bit embarrassed.

  THE WOERDENWEBERS, THE WIRRAL

  RALF: I love the American shows, with police chases. How stupid people are. Because if the helicopter is over you, you know there is no escape. I would stay. I would brake and say, ‘Yeah, OK.’ It’s like these people are sitting in jail and they don’t know why, because they think they do nothing wrong. That is, for me, like, ‘Wow!’ My strawberries in the fridge have more brain! You know what I mean?

  THE MOFFATTS, COUNTY DURHAM

  BETTY: Anything on TLC, I watch. Mob Wives.

  SCARLETT: I love it, I follow them all on Twitter.

  BETTY: Toddlers and Tiaras I love. It’s this American programme on TLC, and it’s literally kids in pageants. And it’s like child abuse watching them. They’re two, and they wax their eyebrows.

  SCARLETT: This one girl had a Madonna outfit and she had, like, the cone bra, she had a spray tan.

  MARK: It’s just so wrong on so many levels.

  BETTY: It’s wrong, but you watch it and you can’t believe it. And most of the kids don’t even really want to do it. It’s their parents who are saying, ‘We’ll do it. You’re enjoying it …’ They’re all mad Americans, spending thousands and thousands and thousands for every pageant.

  LEON & JUNE, LIVERPOOL

  JUNE: Gok Wan. He was so lovely and gentle and polite. What a really nice person. I saw him in John Lewis once. The other thing is Gareth Malone and the choir. Love that. We watched that from when it f
irst started.

  THE SIDDIQUIS, DERBY

  BAASIT: My guilty pleasure is Made in Chelsea, and I know I shouldn’t like it. I try to watch it with Mel, my wife, and then she gets tired and goes up to bed and I’m thinking, I’m a guy, I can’t sit here by myself watching Made in Chelsea, this is just wrong … I’ll just watch another fifteen minutes.

  UMAR: Me, living on my own, I’ve got what would be described as unusual taste in programmes. I don’t really watch anything post-1999. It’s all very old shows. So Columbo, Quincy, Jeeves and Wooster, really old stuff. I’m just stuck in the past. But some of those things are quite good as well.

  STEPHEN & CHRIS, BRIGHTON

  STEPHEN: Judge Judy.

  CHRIS: God, it’s awful.