Hairy Bikers

Hairy Bikers

The Hairy Bikers are David Myers and Simon King, two northern blokes with a passion for cooking and food. The pair began their TV careers working behind the scenes, Si as a first assistant director and locations manager for film and television and Dave as a BBC make-up artist specialising in prosthetics. It was on the set of a TV drama that they first met and became friends.

The cooks first appeared in front of the camera for their pilot Hairy Bikers series, filmed in Portugal. No strangers to travel before they started working together, the lads embraced the opportunity to seek out new dishes from around the globe when their show took off. Over the course of three series, they ate their way across Namibia, India, Vietnam, Argentina and Mexico as well as sampling the cuisines of places nearer to home, such as Ireland and the Isle of Man.

Si attributes his enthusiasm for exotic ingredients and world cuisine to his father, who would bring back food from his voyages with the Royal Navy. Dave, who worked as a steelworks furnaceman while studying a Master’s degree in fine arts, applied his work ethic and visual skill to his cookery.

For their next project, the Bikers turned bakers, and recreated classic cakes and pastries from across the UK. In August 2009, they returned to our screens with the Hairy Bikers Food Tour of Britain, where they visited each county, explored its food history and competed against local chefs in 'cook-offs'. In December 2009, The Hairy Bikers' Twelve Days of Christmas was a typically madcap journey through the verses of one of the most popular Christmas songs. For each line of the song, the boys came up with a fantastic twist on a classic Christmas dish. In January 2010, Hairy Bikers' Mums Know Best celebrated Britain's best home cooking.

Si lives in his native Newcastle with his partner and their three children, who have inherited his appreciation of food from all over the world. Dave, originally from Barrow-in-Furness in Cumbria, now lives on Roa Island, in Morecambe Bay.