Two Fat Ladies was a British cooking programme starring Jennifer Paterson and Clarissa Dickson Wright. It originally ran for four series – twenty-four episodes – from 9 October 1996 to 28 September 1999, being produced by Optomen Television for the BBC. Since then, the show has been repeated frequently on the Food Network and Cooking Channel in the US and on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. In the UK, the show has been transmitted many times on the satellite channel Good Food.

The show centred on Jennifer Paterson and Clarissa Dickson Wright travelling the United Kingdom for most of the episodes, except for one episode in Ireland and a Christmas special in Jamaica, on a Triumph Thunderbird motorcycle driven by Paterson. It sported the registration N88 TFL (the British bingo call for number 88 is "Two Fat Ladies", initialised in the suffix "TFL" of the registration) and had a Watsonian Jubilee^[1] GP-700 "doublewide" sidecar where Dickson Wright rode. They travelled to various destinations, such as an army garrison and an all-girls school, where they prepared large meals, often with unusual ingredients.

Paterson's uncle, Anthony Bartlett, was Gentiluomo to the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, and so one episode was videotaped at Westminster Cathedral and another at an Irish convent. While cooking at Westminster Cathedral, Paterson cooked an original dish, Peaches Cardinal Hume.^[2]

Optomen Television's synopsis of the programme said, "The Ladies are cooks not chefs – they reject the pretensions and elaborations of haute cuisine and are aggressively unfashionable, delighting in such ingredients as clotted cream, lard and fatty meats."^[1]

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Paterson and Dickson Wright sang their own theme song written by composer Peter Baikie, and Paterson often burst into song during the show, once introducing apple pan dowdy with a verse from the song "Shoo-Fly Pie and Apple Pan Dowdy" (erroneously attributing the song to The Andrews Sisters). They revelled in cooking at grand locations, such as at Lennoxlove House near Edinburgh.

"The Two Fat Ladies" produced four cookbooks which accompanied each of the four television series. In order: Two Fat Ladies: Gastronomic Adventures (with Motorbike and Sidecar), The Two Fat Ladies Ride Again, The Two Fat Ladies: Full Throttle and Two Fat Ladies Obsessions.^[3]

A 5 VHS boxed set was released in the United States in 1997 by New River Media. Each containing three episodes from the first two seasons, except for the fifth volume which contains "A Christmas Feast" for the Wolvesey Boys Choir. The Two Fat Ladies DVD set was released in the United States in July 2008. The Acorn Media UK set includes a 40-minute BBC tribute to Paterson, biographies of the stars and "six yummo recipes" in a booklet. It contains all 24 episodes across four discs. The show had previously been released in Britain as a Region 2 DVD set.^[4]

• Note: Series 4 was halted after the death of Jennifer Paterson shortly after completion of its fourth episode.

• Two Fat Ladies at IMDb
• Two Fat Ladies at Cooking Channel