Celebrity chef's last lunch a typically liquid affair

Keith Floyd defied his doctors' warnings by quaffing champagne cocktails and a fine bottle of Cote du Rhone just hours before he suffered a fatal heart attack.

The pioneering television chef, whose crooked bow ties, statutory wine glass and infectious joie de vivre endeared him to millions, tucked into a roast partridge with a female companion on Monday afternoon, hours before he collapsed and died at his partner's home in Dorset.

Television chefs and friends paid tribute to the 65-year-old, who they said was the first truly popular TV personality to take the art of cooking out of the kitchen and into the streets.

Rarely seen without a wine glass in his hand and famed for his four turbulent marriages, many friends expressed little surprise that the chef's final day was spent enjoying a good bottle of wine in the presence of female company.

Floyd was seen arriving for lunch on Monday afternoon at the Hix Oyster and Fish House, in Lyme Regis, which is owned by The Independent's food columnist Mark Hix.

"I do these cookery demos in my lodge at lunchtime two miles from the restaurant and the boys phoned up and said Keith had been in for lunch and had just been to the doctors and been told to lay off the booze," Hix said.

"He started with a couple of Hix fixes, which are these champagne cocktails, had a few glasses of white burgundy and then had half a bottle of Cote du Rhone which he and his lady friend took with them to finish elsewhere. He ordered grouse and the boys delivered him partridge by mistake; though I think he saw the funny side."

Floyd was visiting the restaurant to celebrate his confidante Celia Martin's birthday.

The pair later returned to her nearby home to watch Floyd's last television appearance, Keith meets Keith, where the flamboyant chef reminisced about his long career with the actor Keith Allen and had an emotional reunion with his daughter.

But he collapsed and died from a heart attack at 8.43pm, approximately one hour before the show was broadcast.

The Channel 4 production drew more than 900,000 viewers who would have been oblivious to the main protagonist's fate as news of his death only broke yesterday morning.

Speaking to reporters last night Ms Martin said: "I'm still in shock, I feel like he is still here and I cannot get to grips with it. There is still his cigarette ash around the place and his clothes are still in the washing basket. I'm expecting him to get out of bed any minute."

According to the ghost writer James Steen, who had recently completed an autobiography with Floyd, paramedics battled for 45 minutes in an effort to save his life.

Although Floyd had spent much of the past five years living abroad he had recently returned to Britain to seek chemotherapy for bowel cancer which was in remission at the time of his death.

In 2002 he suffered a small stroke and in 2006 he was diagnosed with malnutrition, which he blamed on his hectic filming and travel schedule.

He had a number collapses in recent years and in 2004 he was banned from driving for two and a half years for crashing his car while more than three times over the limit.

In an interview in 2007, he claimed to have cut down on his drinking. "I drink now in moderation," he said.

"You're on the road. After the show, what do you do? There's no one to talk to, you've talked all night in fact, you've done all you possibly can - let's go and have a stiff one."

Friends and fellow chefs last night were quick to point out that it was Floyd's jovial demeanour and his relaxed, often shambolic, approach to cooking that made him so popular.

"All of us modern TV chefs owe a living to him," said Antony Worrall Thompson.

"He kind of spawned us all. He turned cookery shows into entertainment. He made cooking approachable and fun. He made us relax about food. Until Keith came along, people were very uptight about eating out, and he helped us to chill out about it."

River Cottage chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall said he was inspired to cook after watching Floyd on television during his student days.

"He did something fresh and important, which was to take cooking out of the TV studio and introduce his audience to food producers, fishermen, farmers etc, so they could see where the best food was coming from," he said.

"He then cooked his ingredients with the love and passion of a gifted amateur, rather than the fussiness of a trained professional n the way he directed his own camera man, Clive, during his cooking sequences was a stroke of genius. That's what made his shows so charming and accessible."

Fearnley-Whittingstall described one sequence in particular that summed-up his hero's ability.

"He was on a trawler being tossed around on a high sea and he picked up a fish from the fish box, took it back into the galley and cooked it while talking away to Clive," he said.

"My memory is that he did it all in a single take like a Scorsese film."

Heston Blumenthal, owner of the Fat Duck restaurant said: "There's so much admiration for what he's done. Obviously he was a law unto himself - he was quite vocal. He was quite bullish. He sometimes consumed a bit more wine than he had planned. I think all of that bravado was supported and backed up by a genuine love of food and wine and that just jumped out of the screen."

Born in 1943, Floyd attended Wellington School where a teacher described him in his leaving report card as: "Something of a rebel ... but I am sure there was nothing essentially bad in him. He was very much an individualist."

After brief stint as a journalist and then in the Army, where he earned a reputation for creating culinary masterpieces out of standard rations, Floyd went on to open his first restaurant in Bristol in the 1960s.

He opened several more restaurants but suffered financial problems and in 1996 he was was declared bankrupt.

His first foray into television - Floyd on Fish - began in the mid-1980s after a BBC producer dined at one of his restaurants near the BBC studios and decided that the chef was a natural entertainer.

Over the next two decades Floyd produced cookery programmes around the world.

He would often prepare his meals on location or on the roadside. His most recent show, Floyd's India aired in 2001.

He is survived by his daughter, Poppy, and a son, Patrick.

- INDEPENDENT