The Wine Glass That Never Spilled
The first thing Graham Kerr does on television is run at a dining chair holding a full glass of red wine, jump over it, and land on his kitchen set without spilling a drop.
0:00 / 8:40
The Wine Glass That Never Spilled
Episode guide
In the first seconds of every episode of The Galloping Gourmet, Graham Kerr sprints at a dining chair holding a full glass of red wine, vaults it, and lands on his kitchen set without spilling a drop. The trick was a sheet of plastic wrap stretched over the top of the glass. The bigger trick was that a hotel manager's son, told by his own wife that he was boring on camera, had turned cooking into a variety act performed in front of a live audience.
This episode follows what the act cost. A man and his wife, Treena, who produced the show and invented the leap, worked through two hundred new shows a year until a vegetable truck on Highway 101 ended it in April 1971. What followed was her depression, her tuberculosis, a lung removed, and an addiction to painkillers — and then a boat, a conversion, and a fortune he says he gave away.
The second half is the part nobody remembers. He spent the next thirty years building a cooking method around his wife's heart attack and stroke, teaching a low-input farming school in Oregon, and swinging, by his own admission, too far the other way before he found a middle.
Show notes
The entrance. Kerr's trademark arrival was running into the audience with a glass of wine, then leaping over two dining-table chairs onto the set, with plastic wrap across the top of the glass so nothing spilled; he ended it slumped into his chair with a small "whew." 1 It was his wife's idea. Treena Kerr, an actor, told him he was "the most unutterably boring man in the entire world," and when he answered that she should produce the show if she was so clever, she did — adding the laughing and the snappy signatures, the leaping entry among them. 2 Kerr's own account of the entrance, to a Seattle station: she told him, "Just don't walk into this audience, run in, grab a glass of wine to begin with, then — I dunno — jump over that chair." 3
The hotel childhood. Kerr was raised in Britain, the only child of hotel managers. "I had to play somewhere," he said. "So I got to play in the kitchen." He served in the British army catering corps, briefly managed the Royal Ascot hotel, and then took the New Zealand job as chief catering adviser to the Royal New Zealand Air Force, where commercial television was just starting and he was asked to cook omelets on an early talk show. 2 In his own telling, he never made a bed or washed a dish until he left home: "I grew up experiencing a champagne existence on a beer income." 4
Two hundred shows a year. The Galloping Gourmet was filmed before a live audience in Ottawa, Canada. 5 Most accounts date the run 1969 to 1971; the Everett paper's 2024 profile calls the heyday 1968 to 1972, and episodes were still being taped after the crash. The pace, in the Kerrs' own 1976 account: "The pressure of the nonstop pace of 200 new shows a year was agonizing." 4 The monitor's letter grades, written on an office whiteboard, were the reviews he cared about most. 2
The food, and the frowns. He cooked with clarified butter, cream and fat, and the wine glass was omnipresent — in his hand and poured into his pans. Life magazine ran a 1969 spread headed "Comedian in the Kitchen," and The Washington Post records that it came with sniffy blowback from the likes of James Beard. Weight Watchers International gave him a Broken Spoon Award for the "dangerous" excess of the show. 2 The program's own memory of the wine: "In their place are substitutes," the Monitor wrote in 1991, counting the omnipresent glass and the spirits sloshed over fish, chicken and beef among what the second show dropped. 6
The cost at home. By April 1971 the Kerrs had "well over a million dollars in the bank." 4 The family arithmetic is his own: "With 195 shows a year, we hadn't been a family." 5
April 1971. They were filming on the road; on the second day out, on Highway 101 outside San Francisco, a truck rear-ended them — a truck carrying vegetables. His account to Seattle Refined: "How we were not killed, nobody knows. I was partially paralyzed on my left side, I couldn't jump over a chair. And Treena at that stage said 'I've had it.'" 3 In their 1976 first-person account, Treena describes the aftermath: depression, then tuberculosis and the removal of a lung, then "uppers, downers, painkillers, sleeping pills," until a doctor was discussing with her husband whether she should be committed. 4
The boat and the house. They bought a 71-foot yacht, named it Treena, and sailed 25,000 miles in 22 months with their three children, trying to recover the family. They came ashore at Oxford, Maryland, and bought an 1814 house on the water. There, by their account, a woman who cleaned for them asked Treena why she didn't give her problems to God, and Treena did; Kerr followed about three months later. 4 A Seattle station got a different distance from him in 2018 — 24,000 miles at sea. 3
The fortune. They relinquished the rights to the franchise in a dispute over religious references in their TV credits, and The Post's judgment was that they really did give up a fortune. 2 Kerr's own figure, given to the Monitor, was about $4 million — the rights and residuals he says he surrendered, along with the house and many belongings. 6 A tabloid cover at the time printed a different number, $3 million. 2
Minimax. At a training school in Salem, Oregon, he taught a French low-input agriculture method called LISA; in four years 115 students learned micro-farming and animal husbandry and took it overseas. 6 His own diagnosis of the earlier self: "I became aware that I had suffered from avarice for a very long time." 6 After Treena's stroke and heart attack he built "Minimax" — minimizing fat and cholesterol, maximizing the good things — which carried the 1991 syndicated show and then PBS's Graham Kerr's Kitchen. 2
The bologna sandwich. The reform overshot. He told Treena she couldn't put a bologna sandwich in their son's lunchbox; she flung the slices at him like a Las Vegas dealer and shouted, "There is NOTHING left in this world to eat … nothing, nothing nothing!" 2 The Times's summary of the arc: "In the 1970s, he lurched from indulgence to a denunciation of excess, but he eventually found his way to a middle ground." 1
After Treena. Treena Kerr died in 2015, less than a week before their 60th wedding anniversary; he had been her caregiver for 28 years. 5 "What I did for her overflowed into what I did in the media," he said. 5 He lives in Washington State, in a house he calls "the little ark on the hill," sets three place mats — two for children he sponsors in Africa — and replaced his front lawn with a vegetable garden. 7 In 2024, at 90, he married the woman from the neighbouring apartment. "At 90," he said, "you don't waste time." 7 A feature-length documentary about him, Galloping Upstream, has been in production. 8
Where the sources differ, and where they stop. The show's dates shift with the teller: 1969 to 1971 in most accounts, 1968 to 1972 in the Everett paper's, and taping carried on into 1972 after the crash. The sea voyage is 25,000 miles in the couple's 1976 account and 24,000 in his 2018 interview. The surrendered fortune is about $4 million by his own estimate and $3 million on a contemporaneous tabloid cover. Which of the two was brought up first in the conversion is not something we can settle, and this episode does not try; both accounts say Treena changed first and he followed.
Our reading, labelled as ours. The most famous thing Graham Kerr did on television was a trick with plastic wrap, and the second most famous thing he did was apologise, for years, for the food. But the wine never spilled for the reason the show worked: somebody else had covered it. A working partnership — his performance, her production — built the thing that made him, and the same partnership is what he spent the second half of his life answering for. The star of that show is not the man doing the jumping.
References
- 1A Slower Pace for TV's 'Galloping Gourmet'
nytimes.com
- 2
- 3
- 4Graham Kerr's Spiritual Awakening
guideposts.org
- 5
- 6Galloping Down A Different Path
csmonitor.com
- 7
- 8
This story was produced automatically by a channel. One sentence is all it takes for Neodrop to keep producing for you.