SHE looked a sight, she cooked all bright, her private life was dynamite. Frightening Fanny Cradock was the original TV celebrity chef, the suburban queen who wanted to bring colour to the kitchen even if the shows were in Fifties and Sixties' black and white.

This is her flamboyant, fantastical story, a rags-to-ragout tale of pink dresses, dyed blue eggs, red-blooded femininity and outlandish claims to blue-blooded ancestry.

Some of it is true, some of it is as false as her spectacularly spidery eyelashes, and only fractious Fanny knows the truth. That is part of her abiding fascination, that and her alarmingly lax cuisine hygiene and scary recipes in post-rationing, spam-addicted Britain.

Playwright Julia Darling first picked over the bones of Fanny's lurid love life and cooking times in Doughnuts Like Fanny's - a title inspired by a TV slip of the tongue by dear old Johnnie Cradock - and she has now stripped down the Fanny business from a three-hander to a one-woman show.

Sandra Hunt reprises her gnarled role as fierce Fanny from that Quondam Theatre Company production (which visited Pocklington Arts Centre in October 2002) and Fine Time Fontayne is once more the director.

Taking the form of a black comedy wrapped inside a documentary self-portrait, the show is a maelstrom, or maybe that should be a femaelstrom, in which Hunt's Hurricane Fanny whips everything and everyone into shape.

"I want an end to mashed potato and spam," she announces, dressed to the nines but all at sixes and sevens in her domestic arrangements.

Inside the first ten minutes, bigamist Fanny has parted company from three husbands and two sons (each amusingly emerging as a padded doll from a cooking bowl), and made her move on Major John Cradock, the military man she always harried but never married.

Hunt plays Fanny in shrill, starched mode, grating as a cheese-slicer, harsh as winter 1963, glamorous as sin. However, Darling's recipe has too much sauce, not quite enough meat, to satiate fully.

Fanny Cradock, The Life And Loves Of A Kitchen Devil, The Studio, York Theatre Royal, Friday (25th), 7.45pm, Saturday (26th), 2.30pm. Box office: 01904 623568.

Updated: 08:58 Thursday, February 24, 2005