After Dinner Speakers: Clarissa Dickson-Wright, Justin Toper, Marvin Gaye

Born into a home where caviar and pheasant shooting were the norm and pigeons were flown in from Cairo for supper, Clarissa was no stranger to good food as a child. Her father was a respected surgeon, but also a violent alcoholic, and when Clarissa won a place at Oxford, he refused to subsidise her unless she read medicine. So she went to University College London to study law and was called to the bar at aged 21. She practised successfully as a barrister for a number of years, before settling on cooking as her true calling. She ran her own catering business, cooked on a yacht in the Caribbean and served 60 meals a day in her London luncheon club. Her 12-year bout of alcoholism has been well documented, triggered by the death of her mother in 1978. She eventually turned to Alcoholics Anonymous and while in a halfway house, she started working at Books for Cooks in Notting Hill, London. Along the way she also became one of only two women in England to become a guild butcher (the other is the Queen Mother). She is also the first woman to be rector at the University of Aberdeen. She now owns the Parachute Café at the Museum of Flight in East Lothian and the Cook's Bookshop in Edinburgh. She rode into fame in the sidecar of Jennifer Paterson's motorcycle on Two Fat Ladies, often seen as the slightly saner sidekick, but refused to make another series after her co-star's death in 1998. In her latest TV project - Clarissa and the Countryman - she joins her lifelong friend sheep farmer Sir Johnny Scott to pay homage to rural Britain, sharing their passion for field sports and traditional country activities. There's no denying she's a survivor, and her ability to talk intelligently on almost any subject along with her down-to-earth philosophy and straight-forwardness makes her a natural star. It's unlikely we'll see her cooking on our screens again, but she has published six books of her own on food and cookery, and it's a sure thing that food will always be part of this large lady's life!