Sweet and Sour

Appears in
Far Flung Floyd

By Keith Floyd

Published 1994

  • About

Still sitting in the airport departure lounge, the more I thought about my sojourn in Hong Kong, the more depressed I became. In the New Territories, for instance, we had found a delightful fishing village, Sai Kung, a harbour crammed with water boats ferrying everything from television sets to passengers – and it was wonderful. The atmosphere was electric, and porters pushed trolleys piled high with wicker baskets full of gleaming fish, people were chattering, buying and selling.

We had asked our interpreter from the Hong Kong Tourist Board, a pleasant young man called Cecil, to obtain permission for us to film. It was refused. We had never, in the seven or eight years of making these programmes, been refused permission to film, anywhere. We were all amazed. And filming market scenes before the cooking sequences is an important part of the make-up of the programme. Finally, somebody gave permission. We bought our fish and set up the portable wok at the end of the jetty, having taken great care to keep out of the way of the odd porter who trundled by, or the odd passenger climbing on to the ferries – brightly painted sampans with coloured awnings and’ driven by decorative gnarled old ladies, not one under the age of eighty.