498. The Chef, The Film Star And The Politician - ‘Service’.

 

  Back in April 2024, I had dinner at Alex Claridge’s The Wilderness where filming was taking place which seemed to mainly involve observing Claridge at the pass, plating up his delicate, intricate, exquisite dishes (see Blog 395). Then, well over a year afterwards, an invitation arrived from Rachel Whittle, Claridge’s partner, to join others who had been present that evening to come along to the Mockingbird cinema in the Custard Factory in Digbeth to be part of the audience which would be shown the finished movie. And so, I found myself seated in the bar area of that particular place of cinematic entertainment waiting for the film to begin. I was surrounded by a lot of young, very casually dressed denizens of Digbeth (it was a hot evening) and middle aged and even elderly hipsters, mutton struggling hard to be lamb. I suppose they were just the characters you would expect to find at an event such as this in the heart of Digbeth.

Rachel Whittle

Alex Claridge

   We were called into the cinema theatre and seated comfortably and after an introduction, the film began. It felt like a very short tasting menu - just four minutes in length, which surprised me - I had in my mind that it might last 30 minutes or perhaps even an hour. It was energetically edited so that each scene lasted barely 3 or 4 seconds, just time enough for Alex to be heard making a comment or for images to hit the retina before, like a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage then being lost for ever (though as this was a film it was not lost forever since the mini-movie could be reshown as it indeed was for another fleeting four minutes at the end of the evening).

  Titled, pleasingly punningly, ‘Service’, the film strove in its brief and frantic quartet of minutes, to convey the life story, philosophy and love of Birmingham and of the hospitality industry of Alex Claridge but it proved to be a case of a brief candle of illumination on its subject. Still, it was quite a jazzy affair, filmed in brutal black and white and an atmosphere of punk frenzy, illustrating a man of deep-felt passions frustrated by the barriers raised by bureaucracies and incompetent politicians which were destroying businesses and the city and the spirit of creativeness. It felt like a manifesto. I suspected it was.

  

  And, so it proved to be. At a Question and Answers session after the movie had been shown, Chef criticised the dreary present Mayor of the West Midlands, Richard Parker, or Pointless Parker as he is known in some quarters, for his passivity and held out little hope that Parker will ever do anything useful to support the regional hospitality sector. So, Alex, announced that he himself would be the champion and that he would stand as a candidate in the next regional Mayoral election which is another three years or so in the future. That had been a manifesto and this seemed very much like his first campaign meeting. I asked him if he now recognised himself as a politician - he was reluctant to admit to himself that he was (he is now whether he likes it or not) and if this had been his first campaign meeting to which he did not respond having answered the first part of the question at length.

  Alex had a receptive audience present in the cinema - the students, the aging hipsters, the Digbeth denizens, the Brum Bohemians, the one or two descendants of the once booming gothic trend plus … me. After his announcement there was thunderous applause from that audience. It will be interesting to follow how Claridge’s political aspirations proceed from this point. Is he the man to save the city’s hospitality industry where conventional politicians have failed? These are interesting times and now we have a Chef/Filmstar/Politician all in one, in the form of the man who persuaded Brummies to eat ants.