Si King knows what he cannot do next. “It can’t be the Hairy Bikers 2.0,” he says. “That’s not going to happen. It wouldn’t be respectful.” It is a cool, rainy day in May and we are sitting by the fire in his small but sturdy gatehouse cottage just to the south of Newcastle. It is less than three months since the death from cancer of Dave Myers, his friend of over 30 years and the other half of the internationally successful TV cooking phenomenon known as the Hairy Bikers. Si has decided it’s time to talk: about the man he knew and the pain of loss and the thorny issue of what he does now. “There’s obviously the sense of losing your best mate,” he says. “But there’s also a sense of loss in that the experiences we had together can’t go on.” He seems almost baffled by the enormity of what has happened.
I have known Si for about 15 years. We first met on a food and drink episode of The Weakest Link. I beat both him and Dave in the final head-to-head, but reassure him that I won’t bang on about it today, at least not too much. Across the years we would meet at parties and usually, fuelled by a few drinks, talk intensely about our shared love of gigging as musicians. Long before his first career in the film and television business, Si King worked as a drummer, and he still plays in bands. He is very much the man you see on screen: warm, enthusiastic, intensely interested about everything. He has a crashing wave of a laugh which encourages you to join in. “Dave once said that we were never clever enough to be anybody else but ourselves,” he says. One morning, a month or so after Dave’s death in late February, he called and suggested I come to stay for the night, “so we can talk about Dave’s going and all of that”.
