Dave Myers, who has died of cancer aged 66, was one half of the Hairy Bikers and traveled the world by motorcycle with his taller and equally extravagantly bearded colleague Si King, for TV cooking shows that endearingly depicted the bond between middle-aged men demonstrated over the stove.
The cheerful northern couple’s natural habitat was an open-air market full of fresh ingredients, and it was their infectiously amateur enthusiasm for good food that made them such ‘recognizable’ company on their gastronomic road trips – a kind of working-class version of the Two Fat Ladies series that Clarissa Dickson Wright and Jennifer Paterson rose to stardom in the late 1990s.
The latest series, The Hairy Bikers Go West, is currently showing on BBC Two; The first since Myers started chemotherapy for cancer two years ago, it was hailed as “magical” by The Guardian for its celebration of enduring friendship in the face of adversity.
“Every good journey begins with breakfast,” the wacky Myers bellowed as the bikers rode into an unsuspecting town to celebrate the region’s culinary traditions. Some dishes were cooked for them, washed down with a local brew; others cooked them themselves, often along the road on a camp stove, while speaking into a handheld camera.
While “fat lady” Jennifer Paterson had been a professional chef for more than a decade, Myers and King had no background in catering. Myers had been a TV makeup artist when he met King, a location manager. They soon discovered a mutual love of food and cycling, and it wasn’t long before they were kicking around ideas, including one, they said, for a live show with some “mankini-esque comedy madness”.
Ultimately, they came up with a program concept in which they walked ancient pilgrim routes and learned what the pilgrims ate. They pitched it to several directors, one of whom snapped. The pilot show, filmed in Morecambe Bay with Myers’ ultralight and a pair of Suzuki GS1000 motorbikes, appealed to Roly Keating, who had been appointed controller of BBC Two in June 2004. An email about the program had “Hairy Bikers” as the subject line, a name that stuck.
In their first programme, a one-off program broadcast in January 2005 as The Hairy Bikers’ Cookbook, the pair rode from Newcastle-upon-Tyne to Faro in Portugal. It was a critical and ratings triumph, and by the spring they were working on a full series, with a seven-week lead time for each show.
In the Namibian desert they drove away mosquitoes by setting fire to elephant dung; they sailed by catamaran to the Isle of Man, where their attempts at making crab soufflé failed, and docked at Fleetwood for fish and chips; and in an Irish pub they learned that Coco Pops are the secret ingredient to the most delicious Irish stew.
In Vietnam, the duo were alarmed to hear that a tough piece of grilled meat turned out to be a dog, while in another cafe they were offered a deer penis. They opted for the spicier goat instead, because it came with free testicles. In Transylvania an even bigger surprise awaited them: “Si came back from Romania with a straw hat and lots of vodka. I came back with a woman,” Myers said.
Much of the hirsute couple’s charm lay in their gentle, cultured appearance. As one critic put it, instead of being “two scary guys on big, roaring helicopters,” they were almost calm, with their Scout-like cooking gear. Even when someone confessed to having an erotic dream, it took the form of a naked Delia Smith with a bowl of garlic puree.
Not being trained chefs, Myers and King made it their mission to talk to locals and soak up stories that would illustrate the culture and food of wherever they were. “When you summarized it, it was really just the two of us cooking our dinner and laughing as we always had, except we also spread interesting information about our travels,” Myers wrote.
In 2009 they brought the foodie travelogue closer to home with a 30-part daytime series, The Hairy Bikers’ Food Tour of Britain, visiting a different province each day.
Other variants included The Hairy Bikers’ Mississippi Adventure for the BBC’s Good Food channel. And as concerns arose about their growing waistlines, there was a Hairy Dieters television series, which spawned a Hairy Bikers Diet Club and a series of other spin-off books, while their four-part campaign series Meals on Wheels was nominated for a Bafta.
By then, Myers, a bespectacled figure with a Cumbrian accent, a receding hairline and a Salvador Dalí-style twisted mustache above an unkempt beard, had become a celebrity, with appearances in Richard & Judy, This Morning and Lorraine. He also did guest slots on Countdown and Strictly Come Dancing.
Yet it was as a hairy biker that Myers will be best remembered by the public. “I really love what Kingy and I do,” he says enthusiastically. “I love cooking and I am lucky that I can also travel with it. It can sometimes be really relaxing, really fun.”
David James Myers was born in Barrow-in-Furness on 8 September 1957, the son of Jim Myers, a paper mill foreman, and his wife Margaret, née Anyon, a shipyard crane operator.
Of his mother’s cooking, he said, “The smell of fresh pies and tarts always filled the room when I was a little boy; it was magical.”
One of his childhood holidays was attending the Isle of Man TT races, a dream come true for the bike-mad boy who pestered every rider to sign his autograph book. His memories of meals at the Metropole Hotel were equally sharp: “Cycling and food were already competing for my attention.”
At Cambridge Street Primary School, young Dave suffered from alopecia, a condition he hid from his taunting classmates by mixing fireplace soot with Vaseline and applying it to his bald spots.
His mother, meanwhile, developed multiple sclerosis, and Myers recalled a period of about three years when their kitchen staples consisted of canned ground beef with mashed potatoes and marrow fat. One time his father mixed them all together and claimed he had made a risotto. Within a few years, however, his father suffered a massive stroke and Myers cared for both parents, sometimes feeding them plaice fillets he had caught himself.
At Barrow Grammar School he was taken under the wing of an art teacher called Mr Eaton, who arranged for him to visit galleries in Manchester and Liverpool. In sixth form he set up a mini curry club, inviting friends home after the pub for a brew made from whatever was in the kitchen cupboard. Many years later he relived those ’30p pub days’, preparing a Hairy Bikers chilli con carne recipe, enriched with dark chocolate.
Myers went on to Goldsmiths College in London, but when he arrived at Euston Station for the first time he was stopped by police who were suspicious of the contents of his tobacco tin. The capital broadened his food horizons and he discovered South Indian cuisine, although he returned to Barrow in the summer and earned money by cleaning the steel mill’s ovens during the annual closure.
Working on the principle that “if I can paint a picture, I can paint a face”, he successfully applied for the BBC’s make-up department. On his first day, he was told to buy a wig to hide his alopecia. But instead of spending the money – more than a month’s salary – he shaved his head and bought a virtually new Honda 185 Benly motorcycle. As the company’s only well-known male make-up artist, he appeared on the cover of the staff magazine Ariel with Hamble, the rag doll from Play School.
Before long he was preparing guests for Blue Peter, arranging Des O’Connor’s copper accents and painting Adam Ant’s white facial stripe for Top of the Pops. He gradually turned to prosthetics, making casts of the breasts of Patricia Hodge and Julie Wallace for The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1986). When filming was finished, he attached one of these artificial breasts to the back of the catering van and watched it being driven away.
As a freelancer, he became a regular make-up artist on Coronation Street before moving into large-scale dramas with actors such as John Gielgud. When Timothy West played Mikhail Gorbachev in the TV movie Breakthrough at Reykjavik (1987), Myers had to recreate the Soviet leader’s famous red birthmark so that it looked exactly the same on every day of filming.
After a misguided foray into the antiques business, Myers returned to his make-up, and while head of make-up for the Catherine Cookson drama The Gambling Man (1995), he met Simon ‘Si’ King, ‘a tall, blond-haired Geordie’ (specifically from Co Durham) who, like him, enjoyed a curry, a pint and motorbikes, although both were often ravaged by disease.
Myers’ first marriage to Kate Fox, a costume designer he met at Breakthrough in Reykjavik, was annulled. In early 1998 he became engaged to Glen Howarth, a script supervisor he had met while filming another Catherine Cookson story, The Tide of Life, but four months later she died of stomach cancer.
In 2005, Myers was filming the first series of Hair Bikers in Transylvania when he encountered an austere but beautiful Romanian woman named Liliana (Lili) Orzac at the check-in desk of their hotel. They married in 2011. She survives him with two stepchildren from her previous relationship.
Dave Myers, born September 8, 1957, died February 28, 2024