Fear of Fanny

11/8/2025

For those of us of a certain age, Fanny Craddock was an household name who seemed to polarise opinion in Britain as she emerged as the country’s first television chef. She (Julia Davis) was famed, along with her husband Johnnie (Mark Gatiss) and this attempts to take us through a chronology of her rise and fall. Right from the outset, though, this struggles to deliver. Though Davis herself delivers quite a solid performance, it doesn’t really bear much resemblance to the actual woman herself - and there is plenty of televised evidence that this is more of a dramatisation based around her career than any serious effort at presenting an authoritative biopic. Gatiss delivers well enough, but here again his persona seems more affected than the real life gent. She was a formidable and pioneerin