Hairy Biker Si King: 'We were both into motorcycles and food. We got on like a house on fire'

Simon James King was born in Kibblesworth, County Durham. His first job, at the age of 16, was laying paving stones for a construction company. He got his break in television as a runner on Byker Grove, later working as a location manager and assistant director. He met his Hairy Bikers co-star, Dave Myers, in 1992.

The pilot episode of The Hairy Bikers Cookbook aired on the BBC in 2004. It led to four seasons and a Christmas special. Spinoff series followed, including The Hairy Bikers’ Asian Adventure, The Hairy Bikers: Route 66 and The Hairy Bikers go North. Between them, King and Myers wrote 27 cookbooks. Myers died in February 2024, during the airing of their final series, The Hairy Bikers Go West.

On 18 December 2024, King opened his first restaurant, Propa, in Sunderland. In January 2026 he co-presented a documentary, Britain’s Favourite Railway Stations. He was married to Jane for 27 years, with whom he had three children.

In his Letter to My Younger Self, he recalls the early death of his father, his time working in TV, and the close friendship with his much-missed co-presenter.

My main preoccupations at 16 were everything to do with music. I was learning my craft, learning how to play drums, learning about the language of music, learning about what it would be like to play with other musicians. I was having a great time on the road. It was just a wonderful time of my life really, albeit that it was difficult because being 16 is difficult. At 16 you’re trying to find out who you are and where you belong, and who your tribe is. So it was a special time, but not the easiest time. 

I wasn’t a particularly anxious teenager. I was pretty bashful and a bit shy, and that has never really left me. I’ll still go all red. It’s a bit less now though, obviously, because I’m older. I just got on with stuff, you know. I think my curiosity got over my bashfulness and shyness because I’m a very curious person, and I ask questions. I think that probably set the stage for the rest of my life really, that level of curiosity. 

Me and my mum were absolutely tight. But it was a slightly different dynamic because my brother and sister had left home at that point, so there was just Mum and me left at home, because my dad died when I was eight. So that had a huge, huge ripple effect through the family. But we were still a tight-knit family. You know, Easters, birthdays, Christmas – we all always made a point of getting together, and we always chatted and were curious about how each other was getting on. Because fundamentally they were my family and I loved them.  

I think it was the Jesuits that used to say, “Give me a child from nought to seven, and I’ll give you the man.” Yeah, it was difficult when my dad died. I think it set the stage for a life of responsibility. And I’m still like that now. I feel deeply responsible for everybody that I know and love and care for. And I think that came from me being the only man in the house. My mum was a bright, very independent and clever woman. But I just felt the weight of responsibility. I wasn’t a particularly challenging teenager because I understood that would have an impact on my mum, and I didn’t want that because my mum had a rough time enough caring for my dad. He was one of the first kidney transplant patients in the country in 1975, so it was a big thing. 

If you live a life of experience and you gain your knowledge through it, that’s the way that you learn. That has been my path. Choices I’ve made have led me down that path. Of course, it’s inevitable that in my relationships and interactions I’ve hurt people and people have hurt me. I think that’s inevitable because that’s what life is. Nobody lives in a bubble. But I’d like to go back and take the hurt away. 

My first job in television was on the very first pilot of Byker Grove. And I absolutely loved it. I was a runner. I got the job partly because I had worked with young adults in a voluntary capacity. I was a musician and was playing in bands regularly around the North East. And I used to work during the summer holidays with an organisation that used to bring kids in, and we used to make music, and they used to make pop videos. It was wonderful. And then I applied for the job of runner and got it. It was just chance, nothing was planned. I was just living on wit and guile. Because I had a young child on the way with Jane, my then wife. So I had to get it together. I remember being paid. My first pay packet was 150 quid a week as a freelance runner, and I thought I’d won the lottery. 

I met Dave [Myers, his later co-star] on a Catherine Cookson drama called The Gambling Man. He was a makeup artist, and I was the second assistant director at the time. Then I went on to be location manager. We got on like a house on fire. He was into motorcycles and food, I was into motorcycles and food, and we were both as curious as each other. It was lovely. 

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I was working on a film called Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and I just thought, I haven’t had a raise in about 15 years and the hours are getting longer, and I’m not entirely sure what I need to do. Dave was working in Canada at the time. So I wrote this treatment, a Hairy Bikers template, and I sent an email over to Dave with this proposal and said, “What do you think?” And he said, “It’s great.” So we then developed it together, and it took us three years to get it off the ground.  

The Hairy Bikers was just an extension of our curious nature and wanting to find out about people and their stories and the food that they ate. I was desperate to travel but there were my two sons, and then my third son was on the way. So I panicked a little bit, and thought I’ve got to do something to see the world. So that was partly the motivation for writing the first treatment. We did a little pilot first of all, and then sent it to a lovely man called Roly Keating at the BBC, and he said, “OK, you’ve got a one-off in Portugal. Go and shoot that, and then we’ll see how we go from there.” So that was shown on BBC Two, and the viewing figures were great. So they said, “Right, lads, you’ve got six one-hours for the BBC. Crack on!” And that was us off to Ireland, Namibia, Romania.  

It’s impossible to pick out one episode as the best. We never took anything for granted. India was incredibly special, Argentina was incredibly special, Namibia was amazing. All for very different reasons. Vietnam was challenging. We were just very grateful for the opportunity. What the BBC had done in essence, using our skills chatting to people and cooking and all of that, they changed our lives. We’re eternally grateful for that. We worked bloody hard at it, mind. It was 18-hour days, and it was not seeing families, and there was a lot of compromise involved in that. But it was a very, very special time. 

The press were quite nice to us because we weren’t trying to be anybody else. We were just ourselves, and generally the reviews were really quite positive. I mean there were a couple of bad reviews that we got. I think somebody said this television programme was a bigger car crash than El Dorado. We were like, well, OK. But then the wonderful Nancy Banks-Smith from The Guardian wrote, this is a refreshing change. ‘It is not so much a breath of fresh air as who left the bleeding door open?’ 

I was there when Dave died. [Myers died of cancer in early 2024 at home with his family and King at his side.] I’d lost my best friend. I didn’t think about my future, not for a good two years. We were very different people. But we’d had an amazing experience together. It was a difficult time. 

The advice I’d give myself about getting older is accept it, because it happens to everything and everybody, and it’s part of a life. And what a wonderful place to be with the experience that I’ve had and the wisdom the world has shared with me. That’s the nice thing about getting older and slightly slower. 

If I could have one last conversation it would be with my father. Just so I could understand and know him better because I only knew him when he was poorly, really. I wouldn’t be telling him anything. I’d just be asking him about him, that’s about the curiosity of my mind. Because I didn’t really know that much. I found out a lot since because I had our family tree done and got his service record during the Second World War released. That was pretty impressive, if that superlative can be attached to war, I suppose. 

If I could live one day again, there would be three days: the births of my children. The birth of my children would just blow me away. Still does, still does. But I’d just like to be slightly stiller. Because everybody’s at 100 miles an hour when their children are born, aren’t they? But that’s when my life changed completely. 

Proper Home Cooking by Si King is out now (Orion, £25). You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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