King Adz is cooking!

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So this is how it went down.

A big black car sporting tinted windows and a yard of legroom in the back rocks up at the crack of dawn and hustles me across town to a studio somewhere in Camden. It's all a bit Hello magazine in the green room when I roll in as some blondie in a fucking sparkling pucci-gabucci cocktail dress is getting briefed by the assistant-to-the-assistant producer about what's going to be going down on the floor.

I get hauled into hair and make-up and the girls get to work on what they politely call 'Tired Eyes' and soon I'm looking like Nick Rhodes on a bad day. I roll out and the green room is empty. Then the catering person arrives and I'm sorted out with something to eat and drink. I ignore the stack of red-tops and finish off reading The White Tiger ­ which is quite heavy going for such a lightweight, pop-corn setting. I look around and spot a couple of the presenters dressing rooms and have a nose: each one has a bed and rail of cheesy clothes, which I presume are their wardrobes for the show.

The Assistant Producer rolls in and catches me mooching about. I explain that I'm just stealing from the presenters and that smooths it all out. She sits me down and goes through what will happen when I'm on set. It's the usual questions: "Where did the name King Adz come from?" (I'm never gonna get away from this, am I?), "What made you write The Urban Cookbook?" (Boredom?) and "Where is the coolest place to go in the world?" The last one is a loaded question as they have told me to say "Berlin". I'm tempted to say The Gaza Strip or Hillbrow in Jo'Burg but I know why I'm there and that's to shift units.

I'm led upstairs and into the set which is a bit like any old restaurant/café bar, but this one is full of cameramen/women, production assistants and runners. I'm parked up and mic'd up and then have to hover about off-camera. A couple of the producers come up to me and tell me how great my book is. One of them actually means it and this is a nice touch ­ makes me feel good and I realise that I'm not really shitting it and maybe this will all work out all right. I'm brought another crappachino and after I've drunk this I'm rushing my tits off and then a big old cameraman lumbers over and asks if it's my cook book. Yeah, I tell him. It turns out that he, too, loves it and I know that he's not just schmoozing my tokhes.

It's only then that I notice that the blondie in the dress from before is actually cooking some food, dressed to the nines. Shit! This must be how they do it in showbiz land!

Anyway I'm led over to a table surround by the public/audience and then a young posh guy bounces over and sits down next to me. This is Tom Parker-Bowles and he is interviewing me. He turns out to be a decent chap and we have a nice, pally-wally chat about who what when where why and before I know it I'm being led away and they've finished with me. Done and dusted, and I'm back in the black car, obviously still with my make-up on. Why would I want to take that off...?!

King Adz, HUCK's roaming street art reporter, is the author of The Urban Cookbook. Catch Adz cooking on Market Kitchen June 1 @ 7pm on UKTV Food.

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King Adz is cooking! (text) by King Adz is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.