It’s 8 June 2024. Outside Ace cafe on the North Circular in north-west London, the car park is a lot busier and more colourful than usual. Hundreds of bikers have gathered, with most of those who have taken off their leather jacket in the sunshine revealing a garish Hawaiian shirt beneath. The atmosphere is convivial, celebratory and a little tearful: it’s nearly four months since the death of the TV presenter Dave Myers, one half of the Hairy Bikers. Today, on what has been christened “Dave Day”, a mass ride is planned to Myers’ home town of Barrow-in-Furness.
The sheer size of the tribute is breathtaking. By the time he arrives in Cumbria, Si King, the other Hairy Biker and Myers’ best pal, will have ridden alongside tens of thousands of motorcyclists and been wished well by tens of thousands more pedestrians lining the route. Making plenty of stops for clips from the best of the Bikers’ two decades on the BBC, the gloriously emotional documentary The Hairy Bikers: You’ll Never Ride Alone – even the title is a tear-jerker – follows King on an extraordinary day. Without any disrespect to Britain’s other favourite TV presenters, and while hoping that it is many years before we find out, it is difficult to imagine such an outpouring for anyone else on the box. Would Ant or Dec shut down Newcastle city centre? Will the Narborough Road into Leicester be a gridlocked party zone when Gary Lineker goes? For Myers, they are out in droves. So many people. So many terrible shirts.
When King and Myers first appeared on screen, in 2004, they weren’t completely ordinary civilians, bursting into the television industry from nowhere: they met while working for Tyne Tees Television. Myers was a makeup artist and King a second assistant director, the latter vocation presumably making it easier for the pair to produce a foodie-travelogue pilot on spec, just because they thought their friendship and love of cooking might work on telly. But from the first time they pressed record, King and Myers came across not as preening hosts, but as two real blokes. They had bonded after work in the Egypt Cottage pub – over, as King remembers it, “chicken dhansak, four poppadoms and three pints of beer”. You could tell.
As their fame grew and bigger-budget series were made in increasingly distant locations, the Hairy Bikers’ unforced authenticity remained. Bad gags were cracked; moments where the pair briefly annoyed each other or a tea towel caught fire were left in the programme’s broadcast edit; and no attempt was made to portray the hosts as more important than the regular people or the expert cooks they met as the Bikers moseyed on. They didn’t follow the rules of cookery presenting, mainly because they weren’t sure what those rules were. King proudly recalls how these “two complete nutjob dropout hippies” would film with the most isolated nomadic tribes or Michelin-starred chefs, finding common ground in a simple love of food.
“Cultural exchanges of kindness and generosity” is how King rather nicely describes their interactions with strangers in the most far-flung places the Hairies visited, but he is keen to credit Myers as the wordsmith of the pair. We are treated to a selection of Myers’ best lines, from his description of Maya cuisine in Mexico as dating back to “before Cortés arrived with his tapas bars and his flamenco clubs” to his infuriatingly frequent advice that “one egg will be … un oeuf” and his trademark: the elaborate simile. “Sweating like a geordie in a spelling test” is the one that King, a geordie, seems to enjoy the most, since it conjures the duo’s affectionate west-coast-versus-east beef.
Their friendship was as crucial a relationship as their respective marriages. King tells a lovely anecdote about the day Myers married Lil, whom he met while filming a Hairy Bikers show. “Get in here, Kingy!” Myers would say, whenever the photographer approached. Lil happily confirms that all her wedding photos are of three people.
On screen, if Myers wasn’t doling out dad jokes, he was delivering the straightforward physical comedy of impersonating a Namibian ostrich, donning a Sumo wrestling outfit having had a preparatory bikini wax or jumping nude into a chilly lake. He was always visibly, infectiously enjoying himself, grateful for the experience and the opportunity to share it. None of this sounds groundbreaking, but remarkably few TV personalities seem as genuine on screen as Myers did.
When Lil joins the convoy at a petrol station somewhere on the route north, she is accosted by a middle-aged man in leathers who looks as if he doesn’t cry very often, but is crying as he sums up Myers’ singular appeal: “I felt like I knew him!”
• The Hairy Bikers: You’ll Never Ride Alone aired on BBC Two and is available on BBC iPlayer
