Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Mortimer & Whitehouse Gone Fishing Life Death and the Thrill of the Catch by Bob Mortimer Mortimer & Whitehouse: Gone Fishing: The perfect gift for this Christmas. Join these two comedy greats and lifelong friends on their journey from recuperation to riverbank in this hilarious and heart-warming audiobook that gives you a front-row seat at an exclusive Bob and Paul production. Bob Mortimer and Paul Whitehouse have been friends for 30 years, but when life intervened, what was once a joyous and spontaneous friendship dwindled to the odd phone call or occasional catch up. Then, Glory Be! They were both diagnosed with heart disease and realised that time is short. They'd better spend it fishing . . . So they dusted off their kits, chucked on their waders and ventured into the achingly beautiful British countryside to fish, rediscover the joys of their friendship and ruminate on some of life's most profound questions, such as: How did we get so old? Where are all the fish? What are your favourite pocket meats? What should we do if we find a corpse? Following the success of the BBC's Mortimer & Whitehouse: Gone Fishing series, this wonderful audiobook by two lifelong friends is a love letter to the joys of angling, the thrill of the catch and the virtue of having a right daft laff with your mates. On the fish, the equipment, the food, and the locations, Gone Fishing is the perfect audiobook for fans of Bob Mortimer, Paul Whitehouse and for anyone who wants to listen to a brilliantly written and endlessly funny joint memoir on life, friendship and joys of fishing. What I Think About When I Think About Reading. Essays about books and the thoughts I have reading them. Subscribe to Blog via Email. Pages. Blogroll. Archives. What I Think About When I Think About Reading. Mortimer and Whitehouse Gone Fishing: Life, Death and the Thrill of the Catch. Book 10 in my 10 Books of Summer reading challenge. Mortimer and Whitehouse Gone Fishing is a companion book to the BBC series of the same name. You don’t need to have watched it to enjoy the book (although I hope you do watch it, it’s quite the antidote to much of the rubbish on the box). Nor do you need to be an angler or interested in fishing. You don’t even particularly need to be a fan of either Bob Mortimer or Paul Whitehouse. The book is more than the sum of its parts. I love Bob Mortimer. I’ve loved him since I first watched Vic Reeves’ Big Night Out as a student. Vic would be prancing around, being the star, and Bob would interject pure silliness with no fandango. “Vic, I’ve fallen.” was the funniest thing I had ever seen. The mimsiness of Graham Lister, the weirdly aggressive feyness of Wavey Davey, the cry of “You wouldn’t let it lie!”, all chimed with the silliness in my brain. I’m not an angler. I feel no joy thinking about a baited hook ripping into the flesh of a fish’s mouth or about a fish being pulled gasping from the water as some sort of trophy. Even with the modern practice of catch and release, it’s the thought of the stress a poor creature that’s only trying to live its best life endures when it’s hooked and reeled in that turns me off from fishing. So much so that I only watched Mortimer and Whitehouse Gone Fishing because I love Bob so much. Unexpectedly, the programme captured me, because of Paul Whitehouse’s love for the water, the fish, the slowing down of life, and because of Bob Mortimer’s giddiness about the act of catching fish. The programme is about friendship. It’s about taking time out from the frenzy of work, whatever your work might be, and getting back to nature. It’s a travelogue that celebrates British nature, and that explores craftsmanship and quirkiness. It’s a nature programme that showcases the variety and beauty of British fish. I still find the catching and examining of the fish brutal, and wish that they could be left to swim in peace, but then there wouldn’t be the beautiful programme to watch. I’m talking a lot about TV here. What of the book? It’s inspired by the programme, rather than a version of it on paper. In it, Bob and Paul go into more detail about their friendship of over thirty years and the health issues they have had more recently. There’s a lot of kindness and love in these pages, and it is, of course, very funny. It expands on things from the first two series of Gone Fishing . There’s something different about reading Bob and Paul’s words on the page, hearing their voices in those words, but not being distracted by their facial expressions and gestures that sometimes, on the tv show, draw your attention from what is being said. Through Bob’s view of Paul and his friendship with him, I gained a greater appreciation of him. I know him best from The Fast Show and his work with Harry Enfield. I like him, I think he’s funny and clever in his humour, but watching him on TV I also sensed a sharp edge to him that meant I never loved him. I read an article about Adam Buxton recently, in which his former comedy partner Joe Cornish said something that made sense of why I often shy away from one person in a double act. Cornish, like Paul Whitehouse, had an edge to him that, for me, often crossed a line and was unnecessarily mean to Adam. In the article, he says this: I think I was probably looking for the most provocative answer. My brain issues the true standard answer and then thinks, well, that’s a bit boring, what would be more interesting? That search for the more interesting thing to say is what I sense about Paul Whitehouse. In comparison, Bob Mortimer (and Adam Buxton) seems to be less filtered, his instinct more on the side of silliness than whether he is doing the clever thing. Bob’s comedy is clever, but it’s daft clever. Paul says as much in the book. He pretends not to be clever, but he’s a very clever boy, Mortimer. Much cleverer than he lets on. … whenever we talk about comedy, Bob always says, ‘Paul have you noticed how people these days want to do their routine and want to be remembered as being clever? What’s wrong with just being daft ?’ One of the cleverest things – and Bob won’t thank me for saying it’s clever – is, ‘Oh, Vic … I’ve fallen.’ Who else would think of that? Nobody .” I enjoyed getting to know Paul better through his reminiscences of childhood fishing, out with his dad around the River Lea, near Enfield where the family moved when Paul was five years old, and in the Rivers Usk and Wye when they went back to the Rhondda to visit family. These youthful adventures, being close to his dad, awoke in Paul a love of the beauty of Britain and its wildlife. Bob’s chapter about the act of going fishing, of returning to something last done as a teenager, draws strongly on how the landscape is important to him, and how it’s the activity rather than the success that makes for a good day. Bob seeks to lose himself in the moment in a way that reminded me of when I used to go out for a photography trip. The planning of where to go, what I might see, whether the light would be good, what sort of photographs I might end up capturing has echoes in how Bob prepares for and thinks about a fishing trip. And then being there, and being alive to the moment, all expectation gone. Bob says something interesting in regard to being seriously ill, about considering the limited time we actually have on the planet and how we ought to slow down and enjoy the small moments. I used to look at my mother-in-law when she came round and she’d stare at birds. Wouldn’t say owt but she’d stare at the birds. It was boring for us – we’d be trying to watch the football and she’d say, ‘Oh, look at the birds on that tree ‘ And thinking you might die, you get a little window into that mindset. Being able to be alive and watch a magpie is incredible, and you ignore it. So I got a little insight – I understood exactly where she was at that point in her life. She didn’t have long left at that time, and when something like this happens, you realise you have to drink from it while you can. Not that I think I’m going to die soon, but this made sense to me in the context of the Coronavirus pandemic. This sense that there’s something microscopically small out there that could steal your life from you at whatever age, and the sudden restrictions on living the life you had been living that we still don’t know whether they’re temporary or not, have certainly focused my mind on what’s important. I used to get ridiculously anxious about work. I still do, when my head has resubmerged itself in work mode, but over the last five months, I’ve grown better at turning away from my manufactured stress and looking out of the back bedroom window, where my laptop is set up, to stare at the trees in the RAC carpark and think about nothing. I need to work on giving myself permission to leave the house more often and stare at trees in different locations. Maybe dig my camera out and start doing photography as a hobby again, for the sake of it, rather than for likes on Instagram or Flickr. I didn’t expect to get that from a book about fishing! I also didn’t expect to learn that the fixed spool or spinning reel was developed by a textile manufacturer who thought that the principle of the shuttle on a loom might work to prevent fishing line becoming tangled when cast. Paul’s knowledge of fish comes to the fore in the chapter that acts as a guide to the river fish of Britain. He mixes facts with humour and delivers some startling statistics about the sizes and ages these fish can reach. Learning about the fish was one of the unexpected joys of watching the tv show, and having even more information in the book was a delight. Paul is also passionate about the environmental role that anglers play in the health of Britain’s rivers and the fish stock that live in them. And yet, for all his heartfelt pleading of the case for responsible fishing, I still can’t get past the stress the fish must be under, even if only momentarily. Personally, not being interested enough in fishing to want to do it, I found the sections on fishing technique a little dry. The history surrounding how those techniques developed was interesting, and the nonsensical rivalries that existed among upholders of different methods in the Victorian era were amusing. The technicalities weren’t for me, though. I also found the chapter about how the TV show came about a little lacking. It felt as though Bob and Paul had been asked to include it to secure the tie-in with the programme, but I don’t think it was necessary. The spirit of the programme comes through in the more natural references to it throughout the book. The chapter about the telly show was neither one thing or another. More to my taste was Bob’s eloquence on the joys of a traditional pub with a good range of ales. If you need a guide to how to find and drink in a quality pub, Bob’s your man. Swap out a starting pint of best for a pint of mild, when you can find one, and Bob’s pub drinking technique and mine are in tandem. A trip to the pub is a lovely way to end a book about friendship, fishing and fun. I’d recommend this book if you like the comedy work of these men, or if you’re curious about fishing, or if you just like listening in on warm and lasting friendships. You won’t be disappointed. Paul Whitehouse and Bob Mortimer on life, death, comedy – and how they made fishing must-watch TV. O n the first morning of filming the first series of Mortimer & Whitehouse: Gone Fishing, one of the surprise television hits of last summer, Paul Whitehouse and Bob Mortimer both had the same thought. “What have we done?” The comedians were beside the Derbyshire Wye, in the Peak District, with their fly-fishing rods and a camera crew. There was no plan, no script, nothing at all except “action – start fishing”, says Bob. “Beautiful backdrop, lovely river, two idiots,” says Paul. They chattered on about “the autumn of our years” and neapolitan ice cream. Then Paul caught a fish. It was a wild rainbow trout that had swallowed a tiny artificial nymph. Bob brought the net down to the water’s edge: “And as I was landing it, Bob falls over and takes me out at the same time,” Paul says. “I’m in the mud, and I remember thinking, the angling world is going to crucify us for this.” The opposite happened. Everyone loved the show. “Soothing and tender”; “warm and funny”; “the most therapeutic and relaxing show on television”, critics wrote. Fans who had watched the two for years with their regular comedy partners – Bob with Vic Reeves on shows such as Shooting Stars; Paul with Harry Enfield on Harry & Paul – were seeing a different side of both. A second series is coming soon, and there’s a new book, Mortimer & Whitehouse – Gone Fishing: Life, Death and the Thrill of the Catch, just published. P aul, who had been fishing since early childhood, was the one with the angling skills; Bob had dabbled as a boy, but was basically hopeless. They discovered they liked fishing together after Paul appointed himself as the man to help Bob get over a triple heart bypass operation in 2015 – a brush with death that had left him “down in the dumps” and sitting around at home. Paul, too, had experienced a serious heart problem – he’d had three stents fitted – but had also narrowly escaped with his life 12 years earlier, when he had to have his colon removed after an abscess exploded inside his large intestine. In the show, they talk frankly – in alarming detail, sometimes – about their health issues. Bob cooks up a “heart-friendly” meal in every episode, and both mournfully yearn for the days when they could eat a steak and kidney pie. Their openness struck a chord with audiences, and the response has surprised them. “It’s been much deeper than you usually get from comedy,” says Bob. “It’s really heartwarming.” W e’re sitting by the side of Regent’s Canal as it winds through north London. Paul has brought along a tiny rod, which he has baited with little balls of white bread, as he used to do as a boy growing up in Enfield, near the river Lea. “We won’t catch anything, we really won’t,” he says. “You always say that – it’s the fisherman’s curse,” says Bob, who is rolling bread into tiny balls and tossing them close to where the float is bobbing – occasionally popping them into his mouth as he talks. T heir chat has the same loose, meandering quality that it does on the show – a passing jogger is compared to a dressage horse, a youth riding a bike with no hands sparks a conversation about whether either of them could do that now, which takes a left turn that ends with Paul announcing: “All this nonsense about electric cars, we’ve still got to generate the power for them.” “Eh up,” says Bob, in his soft North East lilt, “are you on some sort of rant?” “I am now,” says Paul, “yeah, I’m on it.” A canal boat chunters by and a woman on it suddenly recognises Bob. “Oh, it’s Bob,” she cries. “Hello!” There is a sense that Bob and Paul could happily sit and do this for hours. They suggest that fishing is a sort of “enforced mindfulness”, in which other things “gradually dissipate and fade away”, as Paul puts it. “I think it’s the perfect and most easily accessible form of mindfulness,” Bob says. “Stare at a float on a lake… it’s nine o’clock and then it’s 12 o’clock… and in those three hours nothing’s happened. It’s amazing.” But isn’t that time commitment why people with busy lives feel they don’t have enough spare hours to take up fishing? “I didn’t think I had time for fishing before I fished,” Bob says, and then grins. “And now, I’m available to fish any time.” P aul admits that he has been so busy this year with the musical version of Only Fools and Horses, which he co-wrote, and stars in as Grandad (he’s sporting the dyed barnet to match), that he’s barely had a moment to go fishing. “I think we’ve been twice, haven’t we?” he says to Bob, although he has plans to go with the actors playing Del Boy and Rodney later in the year. He rhapsodises about the experience of sitting on a riverbank, describing it through the eyes of a wheelchair-using friend his father took with him to the River Usk in South Wales. “He watched the wagtails and dippers, dragonflies, trout rising, maybe a kingfisher – this extraordinary microcosm of nature – and you will not see those things, even if you go out rambling, you won’t see them like you do when you’re fishing, because as soon as you become still, it starts to come to you; if you’re walking through it, you’re disturbing it. If you’re sitting there immersed in it, it comes.” Bob feels he is learning to love nature late in life. “I didn’t know these places existed, or I’d seen them on telly, but didn’t know how you got to them. I’d never seen mayflies rise when they hatch…” “They go from the larval stage to adult stage instantaneously,” Paul explains, “come up to the surface and transform into these little fairies. It’s incredible.” “It’s nice at 60 to be discovering a whole new thing,” concludes Bob. T hey first got to know each other more than 30 years ago, via Vic Reeves Big Night Out, the spoof variety show that Vic and Bob used to put on in south London in the mid-Eighties (“I used to drink a lot, blimey,” Bob recalls). Paul, at 61 a year older than Bob, and his pal Charlie Higson (the future Ted and Ralph of The Fast Show), turned up and performed a sketch, which went down badly. But a friendship developed, with Paul making regular appearances with the duo on their subsequent television shows, even though he was by now an established writer and performer with Harry Enfield. “When we did The Smell of Reeves and Mortimer, you’d come along and play Nazis and things,” Bob recalls. “I’m the go-to for the Gestapo,” agrees Paul. In fact, they had been filming sketches with both playing members of the band Slade (with Vic as Noddy Holder) when the first episode of The Fast Show aired. “We were watching it in a hotel room, and I was like, ‘I can’t go in a room with all you lot and watch it,’” Paul says, “So I went for a walk.” D id they hang out together when they were young, rich and famous comedians about town… meet you at the Groucho Club sort of thing? “Yeah, we used to go out and have drinks, but you were a bit Grouchier than I was, weren’t you?” Paul says. “I was a terror,” admits Bob. “I would never say rich… but, yeah, hanging around with Damien Hirst and all that stuff.” Paul chirps up at this. “You’ve got one of his paintings, haven’t you? So, you are rich.” “Then…” says Bob with a dramatic pause, “the children void. For 15 years, or something like that, I don’t know if I ever saw anyone.” (Bob has two sons, Harry, 22, and Tom, 20, with wife Lisa Matthews, whom he married half an hour before having open heart surgery; Paul has four daughters, Sophie, 26, and Molly, 24, from his first marriage, Lauren, 20, from a subsequent relationship, and Delilah, five, with his new partner.) Paul suddenly becomes alert – “There are little fish in there, you know,” he says – and decides to refresh his bait. He recalls the time he hooked a big carp in a London canal as a boy, but it got away before he could land it. Mortimer talks of recapturing the joy of cycling off with his mates to fish, clearing nettles and climbing up the riverbank to find the stream. W hat we see on screen harks back to the freshness and innocence of youth. “Between the age of 30 and going fishing, none of my friendships had any of that magic dust of when you were young,” Bob says. “There was a sort of functionality to them, just keeping in touch. ‘Oh, I should invite so and so, I haven’t seen them for ages.’” He compares it to the feeling of duty and the ceremony of going to dinner parties. “Even the words fill me with dread,” says Paul. One noticeably boyish element of the show is how freely and cruelly they mock each other’s age and appearance. “You’re like a walnut in a scarf,” says Bob to Paul; “Everything about you screams ‘pensioner’,” says Paul to Bob. Do they ever upset one another? “No,” says Paul, “I do look like a walnut sometimes. We have no make-up or anything like that, and not many people grace our screens without it They don’t let you. Anyway, walnuts are really good for you. Difficult to get into, but once you’re there, oh, the benefits.” I s the mockery peculiar to male friendship? “Women would never be abusive about physical appearance,” Paul says. “It’s a no-go area, but it’s an icebreaker for men.” “It’s terrible, really,” Bob avers, “to introduce someone, and say, ‘Oh, this is Paul, he’s a plonker’ – how sad is that?” I ask them why, do they think, fishing is such an overwhelmingly male pursuit. Paul corrects me, and says women taking up fly fishing is one of the sport’s major growth areas. He can be tetchy at times in the show, especially with Bob. Has he always been like that? Bob hoots. “I think it’s a fishing state of mind,” he says, “and I am literally like a mosquito… He gave me a right mouthful filming the first show of the new series in Wales, because I didn’t know a fish had taken his fly as I asked him yet another inane question.” The second series will be going out before the watershed, though, so they’ve had to cut out the swearing. “I’m not normally a tetchy person, am I?” Paul insists. “I’m really not.” The opening show sees the two attempting to catch a wild brown trout from the River Usk. It was particularly poignant for Paul, who was born in Wales, and often fished there with his father, who died last year. At the end of the episode, he goes off to scatter his ashes in the river; he recalls how beautiful the light was, as the sinking sun shone through the bridge on to the water. “It felt very fitting.” B ob lost his own father, a biscuit salesman, in a car crash, when he was just seven years old. “I was so young when my dad died that I didn’t think it had affected me,” he says. “I had such tiny memories of him, just little glimpses, I thought I had been unaffected. But then I realised, somewhere in my late 40s I think, that probably the defining thing in my whole life was losing my dad.” They often discuss their own mortality on the show, too. In the new series, they go in search of the predatory perch, and attempt again to catch a pike, which eluded them last time round. They have identified six more species of fish they could catch if they were to be given a third series. Paul acknowledges a debt to anglers who have fought to protect Britain’s waterways: “A lot of these species wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the efforts of anti-pollution angling groups.” Conservation is important to him. “Water abstraction is the biggest problem now. I can’t think of any major new reservoirs built in recent years. As more and more new houses get built, they just suck the water out of rivers. Those chalk streams in Hampshire and Dorset are an incredible little ecosystem that doesn’t exist anywhere else.” “I didn’t know this little world existed,” says Bob, “or how important it is to protect it.” O ur time is up. The fisherman’s curse has prevailed and we haven’t caught anything, but it’s been a morning well spent – just like in the show. Paul’s tips for getting started. How to tell your wagglers from your boilies… If you’re fishing with a rod for freshwater fish, salmon, trout, sea trout or eels, you have to have a licence. They come in different durations and cost between £3.75 and £27. If you’re under 16, they’re free. If you get caught without one, the maximum fine is £2,500. And check the calendar. The coarse fishing season is closed between March 15 and June 15 – this is the time when coarse fish spawn. In terms of rods, when you’re float-fishing in a river or a lake, really anything from 11ft to 13ft is about the norm. The longer the rod, the more line control it allows. Floats come in a bewildering variety of shapes and sizes, but two or three types will do when starting out. When fishing still or slow-moving water you would usually go for a “waggler”, shaped a bit like a pencil. In float fishing, you use two main types of reel: a fixed spool and a centre pin. The centre pin is the old traditional reel: it’s a circle, there’s a spool and the line simply winds around it and on to the spool. With the fixed spool the line is caught around the bail and then wound evenly around the spool. To start with, you will be using single-strand nylon line or monofilament. The breaking strain of the line you use depends on the species you’re fishing for or how many snags and obstacles there are in the water. There are many baits. The big five, though, are bread, worms, sweetcorn, luncheon meat and, more recently, boilies. And pellets. OK, so there are six main baits. Actually, there are seven because at number one is the mighty maggot. Once you catch a fish, you need to have a net ready for when you land it. All fish should be landed carefully. Catch and release. This means after you’ve caught a fish, release it back into the water as quickly as you can. Avoid handling the fish too much: wet your hands, get the hook cleanly out of its mouth using your pliers (or another hook-removing tool), and when you put the fish back, hold it in the river facing upstream for a bit to let it get its breath back. The type of hook you want often depends on the type of fish you’re setting out to catch, but they’re all sold clearly marked. Most anglers these days use barbless hooks. T aken from Mortimer & Whitehouse – Gone Fishing: Life, Death and the Thrill of the Catch (Bonnier Books) Paul and Bob’s favourite spots. Paul: “The River Lea (above), which I fished as a kid, was my nursery.” It runs 42 miles (68km) from the Chilterns to the Thames. It’s where Paul first went fishing with his dad when he was five, baiting the hook with Mother’s Pride bread. After just five minutes, they caught a roach – “a sparkling silver, iridescent blue and red little thing” – and he was hooked. Paul: “The barbel fishing in the Wye is fantastic – as is the chub and grayling. People call it the Herefordshire Wye, but it’s big enough to call itself the Wye, and the others have to define themselves by their location.” Bob: “I’ll always have an affection for the River Test, in Hampshire, because that’s the first place Paul took me. I used to watch Jack Hargreaves [who made 28 episodes of the TV series Gone Fishing between 1959-1963] and think, I will never fish this place – it is extraordinary.” The chalk stream is world-famous for its trout and grayling but also attracts salmon and sea trout. P aul: “I’m very at home on the Dee in Scotland (bottom). I’ve been going back there for 30 years, with my oldest friend from infants’ school or with my dad [who died last year]. I’ve caught a lot of big salmon in it. I usually go to a place called Park, which as a boy I would never have dreamt I would get to go to.” T he Dee travels 87 miles (140km) from the Cairngorms to the North Sea, and it’s the spawning ground for wild salmon weighing up to 30lb. The upper reaches run through the Balmoral estate, and the Duke of Edinburgh still fly-fishes today. Bob: “The Derbyshire Wye, in the Peak District, is paradise.” The duo went there in episode three of series one, in which Paul taught Bob how to fly-fish for rainbow trout. This limestone tributary of the Derwent is just 15 miles (24km) long and is also home to wild brown trout and grayling. Paul: “The Hampshire Avon – in the first series, we were in Christchurch harbour in Dorset catching sea trout in it, but it’s the most mixed fishery in the country – you have everything.” Mortimer & Whitehouse: Gone Fishing returns to BBC Two this summer. Mortimer & Whitehouse: Gone Fishing. By clicking 'Accept' you are agreeing to our use of cookies for content personalisation, analytics, navigation and marketing purposes. To find out more about how WHSmith use cookies Read our cookie policy. Your Cookie Preferences. We use different types of cookies to optimize your experience on our website. 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An example of an marketing cookie: uuid. These are cookies that have not yet been categorized. We are in the process of classifying these cookies with the help of their providers. Paul Whitehouse & Bob Mortimer: ‘Heart disease is a time bomb’ Paul Whitehouse and Bob Mortimer swear. A lot. If you don't like swearing, you should probably stop reading now. However, if you don't mind swearing, like laughing and enjoyed their award-winning TV show Gone Fishing , you are going to love their new book, the imaginatively titled: Mortimer & Whitehouse: Gone Fishing (Life, Death And The Thrill Of The Catch) . GQ caught up with the 60-something comedians to talk about heart health, chocolate bars, friendship and the joys of discussing the anus. GQ: How are you both? Bob Mortimer: I’m really well. Paul Whitehouse: I’m actually quite knackered. BM: Oooh, shall we just be honest? I’m fucked. Are you fucked? PW: I’m really fucked. I think what it is, I’m a bit old to be doing Only Fools And Horses (the musical), eight shows a week, and other stuff. One other thing on top and I’d be fine, but the problem is I am not doing enough of my “heart-healthy exercise”. I’m just grabbing the odd half hour on the bike to nowhere, which is fine and keeps me ticking over, but I’d rather be doing more structured heart rehab exercises. Which I bang on about all the time, don’t I Bob? BM: All the bloody time. PW: And Bob, you are drinking port and eating a lot of cheese and saturated fats because it’s your theory that those things are actually very good for your heart, is that right? BM: No, I’m not. I did have some cheese last night, on a cracker.” PW: What kind of cracker?” BM: It was like a Swedish big, round fucker.” GQ: A Ryvita? BM: It was in the Ryvita area. PW: I’ve just realised of course: Rye. Vita. So I assume it is rye, like a rye bread. Which is very healthy. GQ: After your heart issues, do you both follow healthy diets? BM: I try to. After my triple bypass I got my sheet of healthy and unhealthy foods and I was like, croissants. Literally as bad as lard. I come from the era when that continental stuff, the skimmed yogurt and a croissant, was a healthy start to the day. PW: I used to go the gym, then have a croissant, every fucking day! BM: I’m like this at the hotel, Paul. “Would sir like the full English? The breakfast buffet perhaps? Or would sir like the continental shitstorm?” [ Laughs. ] Both: I’ll have the continental shitstorm, please. BM: But the serious point is that as soon as you have that knowledge of the sheer fuckery of the cake, or whatever, that is what enables you to make better choices. PW: Let’s just see what arrives with your coffee in a minute, shall we. [Two cappuccinos arrive, accompanied by a pair of Twix bars.] PW: That’s us fucked. This is gold for a journalist, look. BM: Yeah, but I didn’t ask for a Twix, did I? Give me that. But I am going to have some of it. I am allowed one matchbox-sized piece of cheese a week. GQ: Do you think men are worse than women when it comes to diet? PW: Well, it’s true to say that a lot of men do have that attitude of “Fuck off. I’ll do what I like.” BM: We don’t have much in life now, do we? Which is why everything has gone to shit. All we have is football as a release. So what we do is say: “Fuck off! I’m having a Caramel.” [ Laughs .] PW: It is interesting that all these things that contain stuff like saturated fats, we love ’em. Why do our bodies crave chips and croissants and stuff? Why is it that those food stuffs that are so bad are the ones that are so delicious. BM: You’re right. I go on Sunday Brunch and Simon Rimmer’s mashed potato is like heaven. So I will always sidle up to him and say: “Oh, are you doing your mash today, sir?” And he’ll say yes and I’ll get excited because he’s doing it. And do you know why? GQ: Because he puts a ratio of half butter to half potato in it? BM: Exactly! PW: Who’s that Yorkshire guy? James Martin. I went on his show and I had to phone my doctor while he was cooking and I was like: “He’s just put half a pack of butter in this thing. Am I going to be all right to eat this?” BM: The thing is, the gland in our brain that craves butter and cream is a bit of a lad, isn’t it? It’s the same with the little part of my brain that tells me: “Read difficult books.” Just so that it can show off. But it is a very quiet, squeaky voice. And I can’t hear it really, because the voice I hear is the one that says: “Put that fucking book down and have a fucking Galaxy!” GQ: But you’ve become spokesmen for men of a certain age who need to take their health more seriously? BM: Well, the thing is we’re in danger of becoming the two old blokes who go on about our hearts all the time, but I don’t apologise for it in terms of the first series of Gone Fishing because, for men in their fifties especially, heart disease is a fucking time bomb. PW: It is because it is a heart attack decade. If you don’t get a scare in your fifties, you’re lucky. Because you either have a heart attack and die or you have problems that flag up serious issues. As your doctor, Chris Young put it: angina is the heart consultant’s friend because it is a warning sign at least. If you don’t get that, you could get a heart attack, which could be fatal, or you might be one of these people like Glenn Hoddle who think of themselves as fit, but actually get to 60 and discover they have a heart problem. BM: And I don’t think it is something that is really out there. I didn’t realise until it happened to me that something like 30-40 per cent of men in their fifties may have a heart condition that could kill them tomorrow. PW: I did know something about it because my dad had a quadruple bypass in his fifties, so I was conscious of it. And I lucked in a bit, really, because I had something else very seriously wrong with me [see book for colon problems] and that flagged up my high blood pressure that was the clue that I had problems with my heart. I had one artery that had lost its function and then they put another two stents in the junction near it as a preventative. I walked out of the stent procedure absolutely fine and the doctor who carried out the operation said to me: “I haven’t put those stents in just for you to sit by the fire.” And that is something we really did want to get across with the show. I wouldn’t say it was a crusade, but it was a big part of why we wanted to do the show. It wasn’t just self-indulgence. That’s the reason we took the idea to the factual department of the BBC. We wanted to tell people, look. you can get through it. People who watch the programme have come up to me and said, “I am having a check-up tomorrow.” Or, “My dad is going into hospital after hearing you talk about things.” GQ: Did you think it would strike a chord with people the way it has, appealing to men and women and having quite a profound effect on them? BM: I’ll hold my hand up and say absolutely not. PW: I think that is something that we can’t quite believe. And similarly, although it is not really a fishing progamme, it has had a very favourable response from the fishing community. But when we went into it we did want people to feel they could overcome a health problem, to be conscious of their heart, to make the discovery that there is beauty on their doorstep, those were all things we thought would appeal to people. BM: For me, the biggest part of the appeal is the British countryside, but one of the reasons I think the show works so well is that when we arrived on the very first day of filming, we had no idea what we were going to do. We had the location, we knew what we were fishing for and that I would cook some food. and that was it. And I think that forced us to come up with something honest and natural. GQ: For me, that is a big part of the appeal. It is more intimate and relaxed. Unlike something like The Trip which, although ad-libbed in parts, is still a written comedy show. PW: Well, The Trip is a structured comedy drama. BM: Is that what you would call it? Because I watched it and I’m very fond of both of them [Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon] and they are of a calibre of actor far superior to. PW: You speak for yourself, son. BM: Yeah, OK, but I would have been happy if they just did their impressions. Almost like an old ITV show. GQ: Do you both talk about your health more in your private lives? PW: Yeah, we do. That might be an age thing, I don’t know. But just look at the way men relate to obesity compared to women. Who ate all the pies and all that. You don’t get anything like that from women. I mean, you might get the sly whisper, but for men it is a laugh. We laugh about it. “Oi, you fat c***.” I’ve got a mate who describes himself exactly like that. And to have that mentality is quite good in a way because the alternative is you become too precious about it and far too self-conscious. What we try and do in the show is we do talk about our health and our heart conditions, but we also have fun and try to make the point that you don’t have to obsess about it.