Chat Ed : Welcome to this evening's DINNER PARTY INSPECTORS chat with Victoria and Meredith!
Meredith : Hello all you chatroom occupants, I'm delighted to meet you. I am the disaster queen of dinner party, so happy to answer disaster questions.
thewhiteoctave : good evening
Victoria : Hello everyone. Rule number one remember to turn the oven on! I hope you are sitting at home with something delicious to eat, I'm here with a bowl of olives and a glass of chilled white wine, if you're very good I shall pour it down into the chatroom for you!
Kate : Hello Meredith and Victoria
Paul : Which is more important, the choice of guests or the food?
Victoria : Choice of guests, the food can become an amusing joke.
Meredith : You can feed good guests from a haybag as far as I'm concerned.
Victoria : Mm, yes.
Keir : I live in a small house. I would like to invite some friends around for a party, but the only space for eating is the kitchen. I sthis a passport to disaster?
Victoria : Absolutely not as long as you are organised. Maybe have cold food.
Meredith : Yes, do it the day before.
Victoria : What you don't want to do is have an overflowing bowl of washing up.
Meredith : I would say cold food, hot guests!
Victoria : Brilliant, recipe for success. I do all my suppers in the kitchen actually if you want to know the honest truth.
Eloise : Who would you invite to your ultimate dinner party?
Clur : Who's your favourite dish?
Meredith chuckles
Victoria : Ooh my lord, I could eat Hugh Jackman.
Meredith : Ergh!
Victoria : I would like to have the designer Nicky Haslam, Cilla Black, Des Lynam and Nicole Kidman - she's a good story-teller, we'd have fish pie with prawns and scallops and a green salad.
Meredith : I'd like to have one guest. Dish of the day - Talleyrand, I hope I meet him in heaven and I'd give him cauliflower soup and fillet mignon on a big fat field mushroom and maybe seduce him before we'd finish because he was the wickedest man in Europe.
Katie : What would you serve at your ultimate special dinner party?
Meredith : I'd start off with fois gras with brioche and lots of it, then I'd have the most perfect, grilled Dover sole with a green salad, than I'd finish off with fresh berries over which I'd bung some very, very cold vodka with homemade vanilla ice cream.
Victoria : Bloody hell! Can I come?
Meredith : Of course!
Victoria : For me, I'd have the best caviar - a huge amount (in a beautiful glass bowl on ice) and freshly made blinis and sour cream. Chilled vodka and absolutely, completely fresh Isle of Wight lobsters (poached) with melted butter. Then I'll have Meredith's pudding please. I might have a lot of pink champagne with that too.
dinner party wannabe : im young and poor and after 4 years living away from home throwing fabulous dinner parties i have had to move back in with my mother while i save a deposit on a house. how can i throw a dinner party at my mothers and enjoy it like its my own? any polite way of asking her to stay out for the night?
Victoria : Give her a theatre ticket, that's quite expensive though....2 tickets to the cinema!
Meredith : Pay her! Yes, same thing, well bribe her.
Victoria : Employ her as a waitress!
jason j : dinner party wannabe - why not ask her to cook?
Meredith : No, Victoria I don't think that would work.
Victoria : There you go, jason's got it!
lugged : if a guest has a little too much to drink and starts upsetting the other guests, what's the best way to deal with them, give them ore drink until they are unconcsiour or ask them to leave?
Victoria : Limit the drink - just make sure the bottle is at the other end of the table.
Meredith : You only ask a guest to leave if he has been grossly insulting to other guests. But I've got a very good recipe for bringing people round (Ella Fitzgerald taught me this - how's that for a name drop?) an ice cold towel round their neck and wrist and it brings anyone round from anything - it's extraordinary.
hermione : what is it best to bring with you when attending a dinner party? i have heard that one should not take wine....
doug : can you tell me should i really be taking Champagne to dinner parties?
Victoria : The most chic thing to arrive with if you're a man is a magnum of champagne and if you're a woman turn up with a really delicious scented candle. Don't turn up with flowers because the hostess will have to arrange them.
will_ : I absolutely love the show girls smashing fun!
David : What sort of music do you think i sappropriate for a formal dinner party? Should you play it quite as background music? Or have it so thet people dont notice the awkwerd silences?
Victoria : I like Noel Coward myself, they have to be able to talk over it though.
Meredith : I don't like music at dinner parties I'm afraid.
Aldo : Is it rude to flirt at a dinner party?
Katie : What would you do if you noticed two of your guests were being, lets say, amorous under the table at one of your parties?
Victoria : I'd say don't have a glass table!
Meredith : As long as they don't undress it's ok!
Eloise : What was the most disastrous dinner party you've ever been to?
Meredith : I think the one that I gave when the following things happened... a guest had lost a diamond ring that she has just inherited down the loo, then I pulled a 12 foot long blind down and it fell on my head along with a vase of flowers and I forgot to turn the oven on, so they ate frozen food. Then my then boyfriend and I had the most massive row and I haven't seen him since. That was pretty much a disaster.
Victoria : I can't really better that! Mine was the one I didn't go to because I turned up on the wrong night for dinner with Mel Gibson!
Victoria laughs
Meredith : Oh no! Bad timing! Well, he's shorter than you anyway!
bobbicus : Why didn't you like the redhead troublemaker in the Oxford toffs party? I thought she was great and bought some life into an potential deathtrap of tedium
Victoria : I agree, but she was fabulously rude.
Meredith : Deliberately rude. Don't like rudeness.
Victoria : We don't 'do' rude.
big mamma : which dinner party was your favourite of the series?
Victoria : Caravan, last week. The cook was truly talented and so modest.
Meredith : Brilliant food, cooked on a postage stamp.
elizaday : Any tips to cope with guests who obviously are not getting on?
Meredith : Split them, put two people between them.
star : What do you noth do apart from attend or host dinner parties?
Victoria : I'm a journalist, I'm travel editor of Tatler and I have a column in the Daily Telegraph and I have a very demanding husband and 11 god-children!
Meredith : I'm editor in chief of Art Review, I edit the Christie's magazine and I write books from time to time.
Victoria : Oh I've written 5 of those, I'd forgotten that.
jason j : The two of you just HAVE to continue this theme, you've become such a hit! Is there a book to follow?
Meredith : We hope so!
Victoria : Thank you for that jason, would you like to come to lunch?!
Victoria laughs
Victoria : We'd love there to be a book and we'd love there to be a second series, we loved everyone we met - they were all game on.
Chat Ed : Our half hour with Victoria and Meredith is almost up, so last three questions now...
Clur : Doesn't it get annoying when you have to look at people's nasty eating habits?
Victoria : No, I'm fascinated, I want to develop some of my own.
Meredith : I don't like people who eat with their mouth open - the tumble dryer effect. I also don't like people who push food around their plate and try and hide it with their knife and fork - it's really depressing.
Harry : In a situation where both vegetarians and non-vegetarians are present, should separate dishes be made, or should everyone have a veggie meal, or should the veggies be content with salad?
Victoria : I'd do separate things, but my experience then is that all the meat eaters wolf the vegetarian stuff anyway.
Meredith : Here here. Far too much food intolerance going on but you have to respect vegetarians.
star : Did you see the big brother dinner party? what did you think of it?
Harry : Smoking at the table: Good aid to digestion or total faux pas?
Victoria : Just don't stub the fag out in the butter.
Meredith : I didn't see the Big Brother dinner party, but I don't like people who smoke between courses.
H : What are your top three rules for a successful evening's entertaining?
Victoria : Good company, good food, good wine.
Meredith : And lots of it! And don't get drunk before the guests arrive!
Chat Ed : That's it! Thanks for coming and talking to us Victoria and Meredith!
Victoria : Happy dinner parties! Have a dinner party - it's an adventure!
Meredith : Just enjoy yourself and your guests will enjoy themselves too.
Eloise : Thankyou girls, you've been great!
star : bye girls
Evil_Miss_Sarah : Goodbye Victoria and and Meredith, thanks!
Meredith leaves the room
Victoria leaves the room
