I went to go see the Hairy Bikers’ sell out stage show last week and very good it was too.

I wasn’t sure what to expect, but it was a good format that included bits of stand up style banter, audience interaction, a few video snippets of their more embarrasing years and, of course, two live cooking segments. As Dave Myers said, it didn’t have to make sense, they were just living the dream and people seemed to like watching them.

I don’t want to spoil it all, but there were a great many of little details that added to the overall comedy. I wondered how they’d make their entrance, on their bikes of course!

The show started at their beginning, they weaved a tale of baby photos into their careers and how they met, including Si’s tendancies to injure himself at every possible opportunity. Their tour has been going for a while now and they’re clearly very comfortable with the material, including some good comic timing that didn’t help my laughing muscles the next morning ( Si: “What happened was”).

They often made mention of their appearances on Saturday Kitchen, one of the TV shows that my PVR watches on my behalf each week, and how doing that live was the most awake they’d ever been. So much so they pulled two unfortunate ‘volunteers’ out of the audience to sit on stage and be fed at their side table, very cringeworthy.

Judging by the number of recipes in the show’s programme, I suspect they rotated through the various meals as the mood took them. The programme was a mixed bag of glossy photos of the two messing about in front of the camera, a series of well written recipes and a few show notes. A recipe for Caldo Verde stood out as including “First take a small glass of port. Drink it, so that you’re in the right mood. Next take..”.

The first one they cooked was a prawn curry with coconut with Kerala Parathas. I’d not met this style of bread before and I made a note to try them at home when I next had a curry because they looked like a fun change to rice, naan or chapati.

As with many live cooking demonstrations, it’s hard to see the details of what they were doing from the back of the auditorium, so they wheeled out a cameraman. NEC Good Food Show quality it was not, with the camera man getting his cable tied up in the set and generally breaking things, but you could still just about follow it (give or take some Jamie Oliver style speed panning) and it added to the overall entertainment.

Dave Myers is probably the undisputed lord of the inappropriate simile, some better than we got in Red Dwarf. Funny stuff from the winner of celebrity mastermind, but I would question likening shavings of parmesan to a chiropadist’s floor..

If they haven’t got to your neck of the woods yet then I’d thoroughly recommend you tried to get tickets to go, tis a good night out. Especially with a G&T in the interval.

Yesterday was particularly good fun, experiencing some of the best that Yorkshire has to offer to the casual tourist. I got across to Ikley to catch up with some friends I hadn’t seen in a while and we took the opportunity to stretch our legs along the Wharfe for a couple of hours. Bolton Abbey wasn’t terribly busy, but the overcast clouds were probably keeping more than a few people away. The Pavilion cafe was doing reasonable trade though, so it can’t have been all bad. I didn’t see the field that the Hairy Bikers took over though, I’ll just have to go back.

Bodgers Workshop at Bolton Abbey

One new addition between the Pavilion and the Strid were a few carpenters demonstrating traditional woodworking techniques in the appropriately named Bodgers Workshop. They had some good approximations of Stags made out of a few logs and appropriate branches and had a few foot powered tools, including a lathe.

The Strid

P and H produced some excellent banana cake at our half way point by Barden Bridge, a recipe I intend to approximate soon, and the remaining miles just raced past, though I remain uncertain whether we were propelled by conversation or the banana cake. Still, about 7km in about 2 hours was a good morning’s stroll by one of my favourite rivers.

The Wharfe

What better way to continue proceedings than afternoon tea at Bettys Cafe in Ilkley, which to my shame I didn’t know even existed. The queue for tables was surprisingly short, shorter still because we kept just popping back to the shop counter at the front to get just another two Fat Rascals or an accidental Stem Ginger Cake. Yorkshire’s little corner of Switzerland delivered as great an experience as ever, the breakfast Rosti was a popular choice, although the Macaroni looked very comforting and the triple decker club sandwich was impressively presented. A pot of their own tearoom blend tea was a lighter and most agreeable accompaniment to the meal and went well with the sweet onion chutney I had (expertly dolloped by our waitress) with lunch.

The afternoon was spent with a bit more 6 nations on the tv and discussing cameras and a few details of P’s epic cross-Switzerland walk he’s planning later on this summer, so it’s looking like my holidays are pretty well sewn up for this year.

Getting to Robin Hood’s Bay was quite fun, for no apparent reason I decided to go over the tops of the Moors instead of going round the boring way on the main roads. Dodging piles of snow notwithstanding, it was very very attractive to look at. This is the Hole of Horcum:

Hole of Horcum, without snow

Hole of Horcum, with snow

In the years since I first started walking this stretch of the Cleveland Way with the Outdoor Society when it was one of the first Big Two walks of the academic year, the route has changed little on average, but plenty up close and detailed. The cliffs have slowly but surely given way to the weather and elements battering in from the North Sea. I would surely be getting my feet wet if I tried to walk the original cliff top path.

The height graph, though it really should have stayed flatter than that

It still a fantastic route as an opener to the year, with no navigation required and little climbing, it lets you take refreshment from the onshore winds whilst stretching out all the post holiday excesses.

The weather today was that typically British drizzle that was a test of how waterproof your equipment is, but the clouds went away as we emerged from the cafe in Whitby opposite the Co-op and wandered back towards the cars in Robin Hood’s Bay. The lights from the village projected through the dusk well, guiding us down the old railway line.

Interestingly, the waterproof jacket I got 13 years ago (eek) still does a grand job of keeping the world out, although the reasonably good “mountain” gloves I picked up in Aviemore rather more recently were about as waterproof as a sponge. Excuse to go shopping perhaps?

Here’s the full walk, along with photos:

Robin Hood’s Bay and Whitby