Jamie Oliver has teamed up with boyhood pal Jimmy Doherty for another TV show. The joint organiser of Oxfordshire’s Big Feastival tells Jaine Blackman about snake food, why he loved growing up in a village and the importance of Sunday lunch

Say what you like about Jamie Oliver, naked chef extraordinaire, he has certainly achieved a lot in his 38 years.

He’s forced the government to think about making school dinners healthier (following his Feed Me Better campaign, launched in 2005), turned countless unemployed youths into chefs with his Fifteen apprenticeship programme, set up restaurants around the world and had a host of books and TV shows.

All this from a man who, by his own admission, did pretty badly at school.

“I didn’t do well in the traditional sense,” says Oliver, who has a branch of his Jamie’s Italian restaurant chain in George Street, Oxford.

Luckily this Essex boy had a saving grace... food. “I never got depressed about being crap because I always knew I could cook — I knew that by about 13.”

In fact, Oliver’s been working in the kitchen since the tender age of 10, when his dad, Trevor, gave him a job in the family pub, The Cricketers, in Clavering.

Trevor had reasons for being a taskmaster, it kept the young Oliver out of trouble and taught him the value of money.

It wasn’t just Oliver who was dished out work. Best pal Jimmy Doherty, of Jimmy’s Farm fame, was on washing-up duties.

When they weren’t working in the pub, Oliver says the pair had quite a Huckleberry Finn-esque childhood.

“We were quite free. We’d leave early, come back late and no one worried much.”

They lived in a nice village, with a nice community and nice kids, Oliver recalls.

“I’m very thankful for that. To this day I’m still very close to lots of my best mates from school, and probably still in contact with 90 per cent of them.”

The young pals spent a lot of their time experimenting with food, creating unusual desserts and new crisp flavours.

Doherty’s real passion, though, was animals.

“He’s always kept hundreds of animals, from tarantulas to lizards. I’d go around to his on a Friday night at the age of 14 and he’d be dissecting roadkill. It would stink but he’d be as happy as Larry,” Oliver recalls.

Doherty’s parents weren’t so pleased.

“His mum used to have fish fingers, which back in the day was quite posh,” the chef explains. “She’d go to get them from the freezer and would find hundreds of frozen chicks for the snakes.”

More than 20 years on and Jamie and Jimmy are still great friends. And following on from Jamie And Jimmy’s Food Fight Club last year, where they pitted the best of British food against Europe’s finest fodder, they’re returning to screens with another joint project, Jamie And Jimmy’s Friday Night Feast.

The series is all about cooking dishes to impress friends and family at the weekend, from the perfect roast potatoes to delicious meals prepared inside a dustbin.

It also features a number of celebrities, including Sienna Miller and Usain Bolt, learning to cook their favourite dishes.

Bolt was a particularly keen student and when asked if there was anything he wanted to learn, the answer was simple.

“He went: ‘Dude, I just got to learn how to chop fast like a chef.’ Typical Usain: he wants to chop and he wants to chop fast.”

Oliver obliged and taught the Olympic medallist the secrets of speedy slicing: then challenged him to a chopping race.

Oliver won.

“He’s naturally competitive, so he wasn’t too pleased about that,” the chef admits.

The show also sees Oliver and Doherty travel around the country (in their pimped-out Ford Capri, featuring leopard print seats) trying to bring back a traditional, regional delicacies that are dying out.

On one of these trips, the multi- talented Oliver ends up showing off his drumming skills. He has been a drummer since he was 11, he says, and was in a band called Scarlet Division until he was about 24.

“We had a single once,” he recalls. “It was important for us, because we lived in the country and the bus only came through once a bloomin’ week, so because we were a bit stuck we’d just make noise in the shed at the top of the garden.”

The chef still owns a drum kit and has tried, and failed, to teach his young son, Buddy. As well as nurturing their musical skills, Oliver also, of course, likes to teach his kids (alongside Buddy, he and wife Jools have three daughters, Poppy, Daisy and Petal) cooking techniques.

He’s known for being a workaholic and, in the past, much media attention has been paid to how much time he’s spent away from his family as a result, but he says he always tries to get the family to sit down together for a meal on Sunday.

“With four kids it’s quite comical at times but it is important: family dinners are there to be laughed over and cried over.”

And just like his father, Oliver’s keen to make sure his children learn the value of money and hard work. “My kids are no different from most out there,” he says.

But, they are probably exposed to a wider variety and calibre of food than most kids, surely?

“I test a lot of my food at home before I take it to the restaurants,” Oliver admits.

And though he might have spent a large part of his career teaching people around the world how to cook healthy meals, through his TV shows such as Jamie’s Ministry Of Food, he notes that you cannot always be good.

“It’s not about perfection, if food was all healthy it would be incredibly depressing,” he says.

Yes, healthy food is important, but it’s all about balance. And as Oliver says: “For the love of God... you’ve got to have a bit of cake.”