Ready Steady Cook’s Unlikely Celebrity Guests

In this Holby City-themed episode, two of the show’s current stars went head to head: Ade Edmondson, who was better known at the time thanks to Bottom and The Young Ones, and Rakie Ayola, who had been on Holby for five years.

As she rustled up a Caribbean feast of jerk chicken and fried chocho with chef Levi Roots, Rakie talks to host Ainsley Harriott about her upcoming role on Doctor Who, playing the hostess in ‘Midnight’. She also says that growing up her ambition was just to be paid to act, and “everything after that is just a bonus”. 

This makes it especially gratifying to know she would go on to star in celebrated series like Noughts + Crosses, No Offence and The Pact, and win a BAFTA for her portrayal of Gee Walker, the mother of the tragically murdered teenager Anthony Walker, in hard-hitting drama Anthony.

Lily Savage (1998)

Less an ‘unlikely’ celebrity booking than a simply first-rate one, Ready Steady Cook’s 1998 Christmas special featured two queens of TV, Lily Savage (aka the much-missed Paul O’Grady) and Dame Barbara Windsor, and it was unsurprisingly an absolute riot. The clip above shows Lily at her quick-witted best, delivering one zinger after another as she shows chef Anthony Worrall Thompson the ingredients she’s brought in, including a still-frozen turkey she describes as so free-range “it’s been on a coach trip”. 

Her bag of goodies also features a half-empty bottle of Sherry (“I drank that on the bus”), a Christmas cake with a slice cut out (apparently, the bus got caught in traffic…), and a sandwich bag of sausage rolls, all of which she admits she stole from an office Christmas party she crashed the night before. “Hang on a minute, we gave you a tenner for all that”, Fern Britton chimes in, allowing Lily to deliver the classic punchline we’ve been waiting for, triumphantly pulling the unspent £10 note from her bra. What a legend.