Lengthy earlier than Dave Myers, one half of the TV duo the Furry Bikers, was furry, or a biker, he was a prepare dinner. Whereas nonetheless a baby, he ready household meals when his mom, a former shipyard crane driver, turned so debilitated by a number of sclerosis she was scarcely capable of depart her mattress. “Dad and I turned Mam’s carers, muddling by every day,” stated Myers, who has died aged 66. “Typically I obtained out a cookbook and made a pie or a stew out of no matter elements we had in.”
His mom had been “a superb prepare dinner and was typically getting ready meals whereas I performed at her toes”. His father, the foreman of an area paper mill, would put little Dave on the saddle of his motorcycle so he may fake to journey. “I liked the odor of oil and equipment and rubber; only one whiff would set my pulse racing.”
Nevertheless it was solely half a lifetime later that Myers, after a few years of working as a tv make-up artist, managed to make an onscreen profession by combining these two childhood passions. In 2004, when he was 45, Myers and his buddy Simon King, a places supervisor on the Harry Potter movies, pitched their thought for a TV present specializing in motorbikes and meals to the BBC. “It was midlife disaster time and you may’t have extra of a midlife disaster than going off on a motorcycle,” stated Myers.
The present’s premise was that two burly, hirsute motorcyclists would go to international locales, typically getting off their bikes to prepare dinner by the roadside. Within the first episode of The Furry Bikers’ Cookbook (2006), the pair motored by Namibia, stopping off to prepare dinner crocodile satay and oryx rolls.
This culinary travelogue ran throughout three collection, taking them to Portugal, Vietnam, Turkey and Mexico, and have become such a success with the viewers {that a} memo circulated the BBC praising the 2 males for profitable over “a difficult-to-reach viewers”. “Mainly a ‘difficult-to-reach viewers’ interprets as ‘regular individuals’,” stated King.
The 2 self-taught cooks had a disarmingly unpretentious love of meals and straightforward on-screen banter redolent of Keith Floyd, if much less bibulous, or Clarissa Dickson Wright and Jennifer Paterson, if much less posh. In a way, Myers and King have been the male northern riposte to the Two Fats Girls. What’s extra, their two fats lads have been refreshing fare within the age of telegenic cooks akin to Nigella Lawson or offended cooks like Gordon Ramsay.
Spin-off exhibits adopted, together with The Furry Bikers’ Meals Tour of Britain (2009), The Furry Bikers: Mums Know Greatest (2010), The Furry Bikers’ Mississippi Journey (2012) and The Furry Bikers’ Asian Journey (2014), together with allied cookbooks and a 2015 memoir, The Furry Bikers Blood, Sweat and Tyres.
What was the key of their success? “We’re mates, it’s not one thing that’s been manufactured,” stated Myers. “We’re not snobby about meals. We’re very proud of egg and chips, so long as it’s very good-quality eggs and good-quality potatoes. About 95% of fine cooking is sweet purchasing.”
They met by probability in a Newcastle pub within the Nineteen Nineties when Myers was working there as make-up artist and prosthetics technician on an adaptation of Catherine Cookson’s The Playing Man starring Robson Inexperienced. King, an assistant director on the undertaking, was on the bar ordering a curry. The barman advised King that if he ordered two curries he would qualify for a particular supply: 4 poppadoms as an alternative of 1. “I simply stepped up and stated, ‘I’ll have the opposite curry’,” Myers stated.
The pair cemented their friendship with highway journeys up the west coast of Scotland, travelling with a pan, a single-burner range, some butter, a lemon and a few brown bread. “We’d go up spherical Loch Assynt, up by Lochinver, and catch wild brown trout.” The concept for the tv collection was born from these journeys.
However, whereas the Furry Bikers turned celebrated and their cookbooks profitable, some fearful that their recipes have been unhealthy. Their banana French toast recipe, consisting of brioche, bananas, peanut butter and cream, was ominously devoted to Elvis Presley. One critic advised that their full-English shakshuka, that includes sausages, lardons and black pudding, “seems to be as if it ought to include a diagram on administer CPR”.
Certainly, as their fame expanded, so did their waistbands. By 2012, Myers recalled, he was taking tablets for hypertension and to decrease his ldl cholesterol, and each he and King have been identified as being morbidly overweight throughout a medical. He weighed 17st 12lb, with a 49in waist, whereas King weighed in at 19st 6lb, with a 50in waistline. “I used to be prediabetic; human foie gras, mainly,” Myers stated.
The diagnoses pushed them to make the collection The Furry Dieters: Learn how to Love Meals and Lose Weight. Each males misplaced 3st 7lb throughout filming and revealed their most profitable collection of books afterwards below the final title Furry Dieters. “Doing it publicly was the factor that inspired us to make it work. Folks admired the honesty. We bought about 1.3m copies of our first guide. We realized an terrible lot from it.”
The next yr, 2013, Myers appeared on Strictly Come Dancing, performing a “Tartan tango” to the tune of The Proclaimers’ I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles) together with his dance accomplice, Karen Hauer, and changing into, within the phrases of the present’s decide Len Goodman, “the individuals’s champion”, profitable the weekly widespread vote regardless of typically low marks from judges and armchair critics deriding his “ungainly boogying”. He didn’t win, however the Furry Biker acquired the longest standing ovation for, fittingly sufficient, a Meat Loaf-themed paso doble.
Myers, the one youngster of Jim and Margaret, was born in Barrow-in-Furness ( then in Lancashire however now in Cumbria) and attended the city’s grammar faculty for boys, the place an inspirational instructor, Mr Eaton, inspired him to develop his inventive abilities. He took a fantastic artwork diploma at Goldsmiths, College of London and a grasp’s diploma in artwork historical past.
His first job was as a trainee make-up artist on the BBC. He labored there for 23 years, together with a stint on High of the Pops, earlier than the Furry Bikers obtained collectively. Whereas filming the present in Romania, Myers met Liliana Orzac. “In our resort there was a hanging lady on reception. Nudging Si, I whispered: ‘I fancy her!’” They married in 2011.
In 2022, Myers introduced on the podcast Furry Bikers – Agony Uncles that he had been identified with most cancers. He and King made a transferring return to the display in The Furry Bikers: Coming Residence for Christmas in December 2023, through which they mentioned his sickness and remedy; and had filmed a brand new collection, The Furry Bikers Go West, which is presently screening on BBC Two, and which King described as “a celebration of a joyous and artistic friendship”.
Myers is survived by Liliana and her youngsters, Iza and Sergiu.
