Alexa Chung battled a house fire shortly after she moved to the United States.
The 41-year-old presenter relocated to New York from the UK when she was in her twenties and very quickly became "homesick" so enlisted her parents to make her a classic English dish when they came to visit but her mother misunderstood the settings on the oven and the whole thing "burst into flames".
She told Interview magazine: "I moved to New York. I was 25. I was hosting a talk show for MTV. I liked the idea of the job, but I didn’t really like the idea of leaving London. When I got to America, I was so homesick, and it was such a culture shock in a way I wasn’t expecting, that all I really wanted was a Sunday roast.
"So my mom and dad came to stay with me in Williamsburg, and my mom was trying to make a Sunday roast, and she reheated the oil in a pan in the oven to make Yorkshire puddings, because that’s how you make this strange cuisine we have here.
"And instead of putting the oven on normal settings, she put it on broil, which we don’t have in the U.K., and the oven burst into flames. "
The former 'Next in Fashion' host remembered that her parents likened the whole "dramatic" scene to that of the 1991 action movie but joked that she did appreciate all the "really hot firemen" who came to her rescue.
She said: "At the time I was writing a column once a week for The Independent, a sort of memo from my life in the States. And I just remember being really p***** off that they were interrupting the flow. Then I walked into the kitchen and was like, 'Oh my god'. It’s a story that my parents still tell because they said it was a bit like watching 'Backdraft': all these really hot firemen—so much hotter than the UK ones—marching up the stairs. It was very dramatic."
