Kerryann Dunlop
2003 graduate of Fifteen
After Jamie, Kerryann is probably the best known personality of the group involved in the opening of Fifteen in 2002. As an 18 year old, she featured prominently in the TV show Jamie’s Kitchen and is still sometimes recognised in the street.
Five years on, as a mother of two looking to get back into work, her feelings about her involvement with Fifteen are complex and mixed.
Overall, she is clear that Fifteen has been good for her: “It was so exciting seeing that restaurant being done. It was just any empty shell. And then opening night when all our families came. Drinking champagne watching ourselves on the telly, on the first episode. It was all still waiting to be discovered.”
She is grateful for the love and support which many at Fifteen – especially Jamie – gave her during what was a very difficult time for her. “Like when I was on my work experience in Suffolk I hated it. I phoned my mum crying. It was so far away from home. I didn’t like the people I was working with. Jamie heard about this and he phones me at eleven o’clock and we talked until one o’clock in the morning. I wasn’t expecting it. He’s Jamie Oliver, a celebrity. For him to take that time out to sit
and talk to me on the phone during his home time – that made me really think that he really does care.”
Kerryann grew up on the tough Kingsmead estate in Hackney. She was a troubled teenager who dropped out of school. “Then I was feeling a bit lost, not sure what I was really going to do.”
Encouraged by her careers adviser, she applied for the very first Fifteen course. She found herself in the middle of a messy start up restaurant with lots of macho chef egos in a pressurised kitchen jostling for Jamie’s attention whilst a TV crew hungry to find and highlight jeopardy, drama and pungent characters recorded every minute of it.
“I got a bit of a big head for a while. I was chosen out of thousands of people, but wasn’t expecting the big upheaval. Getting up early, working from morning until night.
Then the journey home and all you want to do is sleep. And when you do sleep and you wake up it’s time for work again. And you don’t have no life. It was so hard to get up in the morning knowing I’ve got to go all the way to Hammersmith and I lived in Hackney.”
She regrets that the image she believes the show gave of her – a larger than life but lazy and ungrateful young woman who failed to make it – might be forever out there and fixed in the public mind.
In those early days, it was a bit wild west in the kitchen. Lines of accountability were, to say the least, unclear. Not everyone was as passionate as Jamie about the young people trying to find their feet in the kitchen. Chefs jostled for attention and top dog status. “Everyone wanted to be the boss”, Kerryann remembers, “too many chiefs, not enough Indians. Because Jamie wasn’t in the kitchen all the time he never saw it. And when he was there everyone was different. After a while it wasn’t fun any more.”
“It was really weird watching myself on the telly. Knowing that many people were sat down watching their televisions every week to watch us progress that felt really nice. Most people don’t realise that I did graduate because people always say to me ‘well, why did you give it up then? Why did you leave?’ and I say I didn’t leave I graduated. I don’t like that people think that I wasted it and some people have said some spiteful things.
“They exaggerated things like college. It looked like I was never there but if you add it all up I only missed about two and half weeks. It was days here and there but the way it looked on TV was I was never there. That was a bit shitty.”
She left Fifteen in March 2003, having just about scraped through to graduation with a low pass. She refused the opportunity to stay on and get her grades up. “I was sick of it by then. I didn’t use it to the best of my advantage and see it through to the end. I regret that more than anything.”
She drifted through several short term chef jobs but it never quite worked out. Jamie asked her to help out with his schools dinners campaign which she did for a while before falling pregnant with her second child. The pregnancy was difficult and the doctors advised her to give up work. Since his birth she has been a full time mum.
Having blazed the way for young people at Fifteen, her advice for young people joining the apprenticeship? “Take as much from it as you possibly can. Work as many hours as you can. Read as many books as you can. Ask as many questions as you can. You can’t ever go wrong by asking questions, or working hard or being enthusiastic. Enjoy it. That’s the most
important thing.”
And now? Her kids are everything to her but she wants to get back to work and says she’d love to get back into a kitchen – ideally at Fifteen. I would love to have a locker here with my name on it.”