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Uncle Roger

by 73 Comments

I know I’m late to the party but my 14 year old son streamed this to the Chromecast tv in our Airbnb and I thought it was brilliant.

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Comments

  1. The shit that Jamie Oliver is full of could block the Suez Canal, end-on. I eat “egg fried rice” a few times a week, because Siam, and Oliver’s mess is a farce, and not in a good way. And I hate his open fucking check shirt and the natural light falling across the designer surfaces. Tosser. Fuckwit.

    Uncle Roger, though!

    (EDIT – “streamed this to the Chromecast tv in our Airbnb” – KILL ME NOW)

  2. 1. How is he anybody’s Uncle? Is it because Nephew Roger doesn’t sound as good?

    2. I once asked a Chinese guy how to do fried rice and he simply said, “Don’t bother, you’ll get it wrong”

    3. Jamie Oliver, eh? It’s still the 1990s somewhere.

      • I can’t be doing with that, it’s worryingly nonspecific. Uncles are a special category of men, whom I’ve always assumed are supplied by some kind of agency – their activities largely restricted to sitting by the fire grunting occasionally, with hair growing out of their ears.

        In other news, any man who refers to himself as a Funny/Cool/Groovy Uncle wants the thick end of a ragman’s trumpet.

      • The same is true in India, where I am “uncle” to the children of friends. The difference is that it’s used as a suffix, so I’m David Uncle.

        I wonder what Uncle Roger would make of the nearest Chinese takeaway to me in North London, where they have a catering size bottle of HP Sauce to use when they feel it’s appropriate.

        I wouldn’t get too obsessed about the purity of recipes. Most good domestic cooks I know will vary things depending on what they’ve got to hand, and taste. And that’s how cuisine develops – presumably a 16th century Uncle Roger would have been angry about the use of chilli in Chinese food when it first arrived via the Portuguese. Now it’s a source of pride.

        • In Hungary too, an older male is referred to by children as “uncle” (bacsi) and it is a suffix. I would be Pajp bacsi.

          Older females are néni (auntie).

          • This (=calling someone “uncle”, not the suffix business) used to be common in Swedish as well, when I was growing up (and earlier), “farbror” (uncle – more accurately “dad’s brother”, the word for “mum’s brother” – morbror – was never used in this regard) used to adress male strangers as well as friends of the family, and “tant” (older word meaning aunt, but now mostly used as a synonym for “older woman” or “older-looking woman”; normally “faster” or “moster” is used when meaning aunt) for adressing female strangers and friends of the family.
            Not really used anymore by kids today, other than in describing people, but never in adressing someone directly. So they would say “I saw a tant in a red coat” but not say “Can tant show me how to get to the bus station, please?” And “farbror” would be replaced by “gubbe”, which is the male equivalent of “tant” in the “old”/”old-looking” sense of the word. (“I saw a “gubbe” kicking a cat” etc.)

            • @Locust In Hungarian you can also use “bacsi” or “neni” to refer in to a stranger in much the same way as you describe, often in a perjorative or disapproving way, with the word “old” in front of it.

              So, people might say things like “did you see what that old guy at the bus stop did?”, using “oreg basci”.

              • @Pajp, in Swedish it’s gone from being used in a polite way, to being perjorative, to becoming rather neutral words that can be either, or even used in a loving way, depending on the rest of the sentence.
                “Gubbe” and “tant” can also be made into verbs, “gubbig” and “tantig” – they’re more universally disapproving…

                • @locust This is great… I can see that we will end up with an Afterword thesis on the Comparative Uses of “Uncle” and “Aunt” in European languages (or at least in Northern Germanic Swedish and Finno-Ugric Hungarian)!

                  Having said that, I am getting close to the boundaries of my knowledge on this subject.

  6. Thanks for posting this Leeds, I am firmly down the YT rabbit-hole now. I have decided that my retirement will be spent learning how to make this shit properly. Or to find the best place to buy curry sauce from at the very least.

  7. I knew Jamie Oliver’s skills as a chef were not rated by other chefs, but he is popular on TV. A guy I used to know who ran a Chinese restaurant told me about a time Ken Hom gave a cooking demonsration to chefs in Hong Kong. Ken Hom was also a successful TV chef and sold lots of books so the event was well attended by chefs interested to know his secret. Most of them walked out quite early realising that he did not even know how to hold a wok properly.

  10. I am ‘Uncle Grey’ to my best friend’s daughter, who I first saw when she was a day old (her daughter, that is, not my friend). She is a huge part of our life, and we are immensely proud and touched by our Aunty/Uncle designation. As you were.

  11. What an annoying dick. I lasted about two minutes. Dinner time in my house is for cooking something quick and enjoyable to feed a busy family rather than demonstrating my culinary puritanism and multicultural cred.

    To put my cards on the table, on our weekly pizza night it’s my bacon, banana, blue cheese and jalapeño pizza that gets demolished first (don’t judge until you’ve tried it!). I also love chorizo in paella and will happily call any sparkling white from Australia ‘Champagne’.

    • I watched it all (never seen him before) and I thought it was done rather tongue in cheek and overacted for laughs – and I thought that he mostly was very funny, even when I disagreed with the opinions. It seemed to me as if he was playing a stereotypical character (for exemple: to me it sounded like he exaggerated his accent, or imitated the stronger accent of his parents – I could be wrong, but that’s what it sounds like to me).

    • The not so secret secret is Uncle Roger is a character.

      You’re wrong about the champagne thing though. That’s going to cost you big time in a bar if you do that.

  12. Watched a few more, hilarious, especially about Jamie, he liked Gordon Ramsey’s fried rice and mostly Nigella though, the latter based not exclusively on her cooking skills

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