Toast (2010)

Based on Nigel Slater’s memoir, Toast was a comedy-drama TV-movie shown on BBC4 over Christmas. I’ve heard of Slater, and my knowledge of him and his life begins and ends with recognition of his name. The main draw for me therefore was the good review in the Radio Times along with the fact that Helena Bonham Carter featured heavily.

Toast turned out to be a hilarious, poignant and tasty journey through a couple of key early years in Slater’s young life. Newcomer Oscar Kennedy portrayed Slater around the age of 10/11, for about 2/3 of the film, with Freddie Highmore playing him at 16 for the remaining 1/3. Constant through the drama is Ken Stott as Slater’s father, and these three actors really make the story come alive and fill it with warmth and humour, helped in no small part by a terrifically witty script. I’d single out young Kennedy as the best actor in the piece, his performance is flawless and he’s an utter delight – it was a shame when he grew into Highmore, although the latter was great too.

Bonham Carter played Slater’s step-mother, a common cleaning lady who works her way into his father’s affections (via his stomach) following the asthmatic death of Slater’s mother. His mother could cook toast and anything that came in a tin (though not often successfully) but step-mother Joan Potter is a culinary genius. Forever ignored or shouted at by his grumpy father, young Slater turns to home economics to compete with Joan’s cookery skills. It is these skills at cooking and being a food critic for which Nigel Slater, the adult, is now (apparently) well known.

As well as following Nigel’s turbulent relationship with his father, and then Joan, and seeing how the seeds of his fascination for food were sown, the film quietly tackles the young man’s emerging sexuality. As I say, I didn’t know Slater before, so I didn’t know he was gay, so it came as a pleasant surprise to see the tender and tentative way in which this fact was revealed in Toast. From an early scene with Nigel catching a glimpse of the family gardener changing his trousers and his subsequent idolising of him, to his decision to take up a male classmates offer of seeing his privates rather than a young girl’s knickers, the inklings of his sexuality were there but not obvious.

When Highmore took over and the older Nigel took up home economics to choruses of ‘poof’ from female classmates it was still possible that I was reading too much in to events. Then when he eventually gets a kiss from a male friend he is inspired, following the sudden death of his father, to jack in life with Joan Potter to find try his luck in London. There the film ends, with real-life Slater cameoing as a chef taking young Nigel on at the Savoy, and telling him that everything will be alright now. It’s a sweet moment, and one that left me with a grin, as did much of the preceding 90 minutes. As a portrayal of young sexuality and a difficult parental relationship, Toast succeeded admirably.