Who is Andi Oliver, the frontrunner to save MasterChef?

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a day ago

With John Torode having been taken down by the shrapnel from Gregg Wallace's spectacular BBC-career implosion, the Corporation, along with MasterChef production company Banijay, is already mulling over candidates to replace him.
An inquiry ordered by Banijay into Wallace's on-set behaviour found 83 allegations made against him, mainly relating to inappropriate sexual language and humour, of which 45 were upheld. Wallace has been sacked and, this year, was replaced as co-host of Celebrity MasterChef by Grace Dent.
However, the inquiry also uncovered an allegation made against Torode – that he used 'an extremely offensive racist term' during a social occasion in 2018 or 2019. Despite Torode stating he had 'no recollection' of the incident, the complaint was upheld and Banijay and the BBC have agreed that Torode's contract will not be renewed. And if the bookies are to be trusted, it seems they have already found a perfect replacement in Great British Menu host Andi Oliver.
Oliver is an unmistakable presence on British television. The 62-year-old chef is renowned for her vivid frocks, enormous black-rimmed glasses, shaven head and arguably Britain's most famous diastema since Terry-Thomas. Her idiosyncratic background, natural exuberance and professional experience mark her out as a no-brainer for the MasterChef gig.
Ironically, it is something that she has in common with the disgraced Wallace that puts her ahead of the other candidates – she is a true one-off. Wallace's unguarded barrow boy patter and costermonger earthiness was unfeigned and untaught – love him or loathe him, Wallace brought his true self to the screen. As does Oliver. Both stand in stark contrast to many of their overly media-trained peers on Saturday Kitchen.
Like Wallace, Oliver's route to culinary stardom was hardly typical. Born in London in 1963 to Antiguan parents, Oliver had a peripatetic childhood thanks to her father's role in the RAF.
After stints in Kent and Cyprus, where Oliver first found her love of cooking, the family moved to Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, where the chef suffered racism from children and teachers, as well as bullying and violence in the playground. Oliver left school aged 16 before sitting her O-levels, and moved to an east London squat where she fell in with a bohemian crowd. Ultimately, she joined the post-punk band Rip Rig + Panic, whose members included her brother, Sean and Swedish singer Neneh Cherry, who would become a lifelong friend (and cooking partner).
Early culinary adventures included cooking for the band, with Cherry, and at a nightclub off Powis Square in west London.
At 20, Oliver had her daughter – the former Pop World presenter Miquita Oliver – and, with the father nowhere in sight, moved to Ladbroke Grove, where her contemporaries included Alison Owen, mother of pop star and actress Lily Allen, who now hosts the popular warts-and-all Miss Me? podcast with Miquita (the podcast's radical honesty means we now know that Miquita was conceived on Hampstead Heath). It is in the media where Oliver first made waves, with stints hosting late-night Channel 4 shows, leading to her own arts and entertainment programme on Greater London Radio.
At the same time, she was building a burgeoning career in the restaurant trade, running the 'ephemeral' pop-up The Moveable Feast, before going on to be the creative director at The Birdcage pub on east London's trendy Colombia Road, and launching her own restaurants, first at the Jackdaw and Star in Homerton, then Andi's in Stoke Newington. More recently, she opened Wadadli Kitchen in the Olympics-regenerated Hackney Wick, which specialises in Antiguan cuisine.
Guest appearances on TV staples such as Saturday Kitchen, as well as a regular gig on Radio 4's enduring The Kitchen Cabinet, ultimately lead Oliver to the role she is best known for today. She joined BBC Two's Great British Menu, a sort-of souped-up FA Cup for UK chefs, firstly as a judge in 2017 (replacing Prue Leith), before taking on hosting duties in 2020 (replacing Susan Calman).
Her charisma and idiosyncrasies – the booming laugh, the flamboyant dress sense, the refusal to play the part of the cold head chef – have proved a boon for the BBC, who have been keen to champion this later-life rising star. Oliver is where she is on merit, but the BBC is quite rightly pleased to promote a black, middle-aged woman in their primetime schedules.
Few TV chefs look like Oliver ('I would struggle to name another black woman in the position as me – I know my visibility is important,' she said in 2022), and she can be given credit for helping to inspire a diverse new generation of chefs, from Big Zuu to last year's MasterChef champion Brin Pirathpan. Recent Oliver-fronted series have included The Caribbean with Andi and Miquita, in which the pair reconnected with their heritage, and Andi Oliver's Fabulous Feasts.
It is the latter of these that perhaps gives us a clue as to how Oliver might approach MasterChef. With food critic Grace Dent in pole position to replace Wallace in the 'everyman' role (Dent co-hosted the most recent series of Celebrity MasterChef with Torode), the BBC needs a chef alongside her. Fabulous Feasts was a joyous and heartwarming celebration of British cookery, with Oliver travelling the country, throwing parties for communities in need of one. Oliver is a far cry from the typical model of the stern, exacting, stickler-for-perfection head chef (as favoured by white men of a certain vintage), yet her warmth is matched by her depth of knowledge.
The BBC will certainly want to move MasterChef as far away from Wallace and Torode as possible, and will see Oliver as the antidote to the sexism and racism storms. In a recent piece with The Guardian, Oliver treated the interviewer to some soup, telling him that doing so was 'giving yourself the care you need. And sharing it with other people doesn't just fix you, but briefly, the world around you'. Wallace, famously, confessed he cooked for his family only once a week. Oliver wishes to nourish those around her. The same could hardly be said for Wallace.
In the same interview, Oliver touched upon the Wallace allegations, saying she was not surprised by them, though she did not know him personally.
'I heard stuff. Everyone did', she said. She warned that real change won't come about via a 'media outcry', and that it will require real systemic change: 'Thousands of people shouting about Gregg Wallace on Twitter doesn't interest me. What does is whether we remember this in six months, or will there be more fake shock and outrage when it happens all over again.' Six months on from saying those words, it looks as if Oliver might embody the change needed.
Are there, however, any skeletons in her closet that BBC execs should be nervous about? Unlikely. The closest thing would be the hosting of Channel 4's Baadasss TV, a 1994 black-culture show she hosted with rapper Ice-T. While the show was criticised at the time for stereotyping and 'ghetto broadcasting', and the content including everything from rapping dwarves to softcore pornography (it was, after all, produced by the same company who made Eurotrash), it was an honest attempt to bring black culture to British television when there was vanishingly little seen elsewhere.
Indeed, Baadasss TV can be seen as indicative of Oliver's unique, nomadic career that has always sought to celebrate people as much as the food they eat. If she gets the MasterChef gig, the BBC will be confident it is a step in the right direction – most importantly, it is a step that distances them from the poisoned reputations of the two men who made modern MasterChef what it is today.
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