Nasty Pasty

It is Cornwall, 2013. The dear old county is on a knife-edge, in imminent, grave danger of becoming just another non-descript, leafy suburb of the Home Counties. Increasingly, the ethnic Cornish are being bought up and sold out, their dialect ridiculed and their accents punctuated by estuarine glottal stops, marginalized in their own land. Cup cakes and slices of quiche are rumoured to have been seen in a baker’s window in Truro. The tin mines have all closed. The Spanish are hoovering up the fish, Marks and Sparks are trying to make clotted cream, and now the greatest Cornish icon of them all, the pasty, is under threat.

In the sleepy north coast fishing village of Tredogend, TV star super-chef ‘Huge!’ larges his way into town with his simpering, sycophantic media circus in tow. Huge!, a swaggering blackguard, a bounder, a rake, a snake-in-the-grass, shagnasty, pasty-grasping fake, is intent on bulldozing his celebrity through centuries of Cornish culture and identity in his gluttonous lust to wrest the secret alchemy of the pasty from the Cornish, and re-invent himself as Pasty King of the World.

And it is in Tredogend that he finds supreme artisan pasty baker Oggy Sloggett; a proper honest family man, a man who sings for joy, his voice as an organ pumping from the depths of his big old, good old Cornish heart. He is a man dogged by a log-jam of debt and bogged down in the unrelenting daily slog of pasty baking, but a man whose family are the unwitting custodians of the mysterious sorcery of the world’s most fabulous, mouth-wateringly delicious dish.

Will he, and Cornwall, sleepwalk into oblivion, or will a hero emerge to save the dear old county?

Shall Trelawney live? Or shall Trelawney die?

Nasty pasty…