“Hello there. Do you like fish? To eat, I mean, not to look at or catch. Well, I do.

I am, in fact, one of the world’s most compulsive piscavores.”

What do you think of when you think of Vincent Price?

Murder? The macabre? “Thriller”?

You probably don’t think of a hardworking everyman, a strapping idealist, like his character Bob Maxwell, in Nazi Eyes On Canada: “Holly Metcalf and Bob Maxwell Story.”

You probably know that he was debonair, but did you know that he was a “foodie” before there were foodies? He even wrote a cookbook or two.

-
Food featured prominently in his BBC Radio series The Price Of Fear, which ran from 1973 to 1975, and again in 1983. The series is remarkable in that even when you know the cannibalism is coming, you don’t know quite how. You know someone’s going to meet a foul end, but that does nothing to mitigate the suspense.

In “Fish,” Mr. Price tells us of his love for seafood, how he finds “there is an almost ritual purity about fish.”

The Japanese, you know, eat their fish raw. Shredding and flaking the flesh and dipping it into piquant sauces - soya, horseradish, that sort of thing. The effect can be delicious. A delicate point and counterpoint - air and dessicant, plucking at the palate. The taste can be exquisite and yet, if you should think too hard about those raw, gelatinous strips of fish, you may find the feel of them, the sight of them, even, is somehow obscene.

But then my attitude in these matters is colored by a most unnerving experience I underwent in Australia. . .

where he stopped on his way to filming a movie in Hong Kong, then again on his way to and from Japan for filming.

He calls the story simply, “Fish.”

I call it great radio.

Listen Now:

 Price of Fear: Fish: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download