Dave Myers, 64, appeared on The Guardian podcast Comfort Eating with Grace Dent yesterday. The star makes up one half of the famous travelling chef duo, the Hairy Bikers, alongside fellow food enthusiast and friend Si King, 55.
MasterChef regular Grace, 48, has hosted plenty of famous guests on her podcast, where they discuss their favourite comfort foods before delving a bit deeper into their personal lives.
After a heartfelt discussion about Dave’s tough adolescence as a young carer, Grace went on to ask him about his relationship with fellow Hairy Biker Si, who he’s been on the road with for nearly 20 years.
After Grace remarked that it seemed like the pair are “actually, genuinely, friends”, Dave confirmed this to be true.
“Oh we are!” Dave began. “We’ve been through a lot together, you know, over the years.”
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“Bereavements, tragedies, you know, the whole lot. Divorces… Not to each other, but you know what I mean,” he added with a chuckle.
“We’ve been through a lot of the harsh stuff as well. He had a brain haemorrhage in 2013 and he was proper poorly. It was a shock, really.”
Dave went on to explain that it was around that time that Si had planned to take time off work to spend some time at home with his family.
This helped prompt Dave’s decision to perform in Strictly Come Dancing, which he admitted he “absolutely adored”.
On the day Si was taken to hospital in Newcastle, Dave had seen him that morning.
The pair were on a book tour, where they spent hours signing copies of their latest cookbook for their many fans.
Dave admitted to Grace that Si did show some signs that there was something wrong that day, but that he had thought nothing of it at the time.
“He kept saying, ‘I’ve got this funny headache, you know,” and I was saying, ‘Oh well, so have I.’ If you spend so many hours in Costco signing books you do get a bit…” Dave confessed.
The chef described to Grace how he felt as though the pair were tucking into some bacon sandwiches and tea on the quayside one moment, and in hospital the next.
“That was the day he went home, and he said he was watching the rugby… And the players slid off the screen! Next thing I knew he was in intensive care in Newcastle, so I went up there,” Dave remembered.
The star went on to joke about how his pal’s one request while in hospital was that he snuck him in a pork pie from M&S, which he managed to achieve.
The Hairy Bikers met in the 1990s and both have backgrounds in television production.
They first appeared on UK television as presenters of The Hairy Bikers’ Cookbook in 2004 and this show went on to run for four seasons on the BBC.
Watch their latest series The Hairy Bikers Go North tonight at 7pm on BBC Two.