Keith Floyd, who has died of a heart attack aged 65, will be best remembered for his television cookery programmes in the late 1980s and early 1990s – the epitome of gonzo-TV – as wine destined for the pot was drunk instead by the presenter. Cheerful mayhem was the consequence, though attentive viewers learned sound basics of flavour and technique. Floyd's performances, on or near the stove, were a refreshing departure from the prissy, controlled style then in favour at the BBC, or the alternative mode of half an hour with a French chef whose incomprehensible English made the recipes a mystery.
Floyd came to public performance after a long and, he would have said, punishing apprenticeship in running restaurants. Brought up on the slopes of the Quantocks and Exmoor, hence, perhaps, his love of game, fishing and the odd rook for the pot (his father was a keen field sportsman), he was educated at Wellington school, in Somerset, where a fellow pupil was Jeffrey Archer.
Electing for a career in journalism, he found this not to his liking and joined the army, gaining a commission in the 3rd Royal Tank Regiment in 1963. He claimed that his rush of military blood was inspired by the heroics of Stanley Baker and Michael Caine in Zulu, though in fact that film was not released until 1964. In reality, his regiment was stationed in Germany where, though he was only a subaltern, his responsibilities extended to the meals in the officers' mess. On those nights that he was on duty the cooks were encouraged to produce high-falutin' French dishes in preference to roast meat and two veg.
His catering skills, however, did nothing to prolong his military career, which was soon abandoned for an Orwellian stint of kitchen portering and restaurant work in London and France, before he returned to the West Country in 1966. Somehow, and somewhere, he had learned enough about cookery to open Floyd's Bistro in Bristol, in the Georgian district of Clifton, where the posh people, students and broadcasters lived.
Floyd was a natural cook of great skill, and a restaurateur and host of effervescent charm. However, he was an appalling businessman who rarely kept hold of his money for long enough to pay the bills that mattered, while often charging his customers over the odds for his wares. His perception of the ambivalent role of the restaurateur – somewhere between pander and provider – was clear and forcefully expressed, sometimes too forcefully for his own good.
His first Bristol period ended in the sale of the restaurant in the early 1970s. Floyd took off on his yacht, Flirty, to lotus-eat in the Mediterranean for a couple of years. When money got tight, he began exporting antiques to France and importing wine to England. Then, when in turn the customs regulations became tight, he opened his own small restaurant in the Provençal town of L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue. Not far from Avignon, its main claim to fame is that it contains the greatest concentration of antique shops in mainland France (300 and counting).
It says much for Floyd's bravura that he succeeded where many Englishmen have failed. Success, though, is a relative term and when he did return to Bristol in 1979-80 it was without a penny to his name. He was only able to go back into business, with another restaurant called Floyd's, courtesy of friends who stumped up the capital as advances on meals yet to be cooked.
Extravagance, incompetence and the VAT bill would have done for him a third and even final time had he not been rescued by unlikely fame in broadcasting. The chain of coincidence began with a small book from a local publisher called Floyd's Food (1981, with a foreword by the actor Leonard Rossiter) which led to 10-minute recipe chats on the Bristol station Radio West; these in turn developed into a short-lived yet garrulous phone-in.
By then something of a local hero, he was tried out on TV, where his first foray culminated with him roasting a guinea fowl complete with giblets in their plastic bag (a Julia Child moment). More successful was a short film of him cooking made by David Pritchard, then at BBC Bristol. This might have come to nothing had not Pritchard been relocated to Plymouth and able to propose a new series on fish cookery. A pilot show was made at the end of 1984 and Floyd On Fish went out in the summer of 1985.
Pritchard's style of direction was exactly suited to that of his presenter. Inspired by chaos, Floyd would address the crew as often as the camera, would get palpably squiffy as programmes wore on, would indulge in any manner of derring-do (from playing rugby with Welshmen to shooting seals and eating puffins) and would be lovably madcap. Yet the cookery content was red-hot, copper-bottomed stuff. Never refined, but still good. Success was reinforced, and financed, by popular books to go with each series – Floyd On France (1987), Floyd On Britain and Ireland (1988), Floyd On Oz (1991), Floyd On Spain (1992), Far Flung Floyd (1993), Floyd On Italy (1994) – and the partnership continued swimmingly (though never without friction) until 1994 when there was a bust-up.
Thereafter, Floyd carried on in much the same style for commercial channels – with several series on Channel Five – national tourist offices and anyone who would put up the money. His long-term popularity was as great, if not greater, outside the UK. It often seemed that a Floyd programme was showing on at least two airlines and in a hundred hotel lobbies at any given moment.
If his media life seemed a treadmill – it included a one-man show complete with piano and vocal backing – he still found time at the beginning of the 1990s to start another restaurant. This was the pub the Maltsters Arms (rechristened Floyd's Inn) in a hamlet near Dartmouth, in Devon. There he drove his white convertible Bentley through narrow lanes, got married for the third time, to Shaunagh Mullet (though she left him after he accused her of forgetting his 50th birthday), and built up colossal debts.
We were dining peacefully one night in his pub when the hum of conversation was silenced by the crack of breaking china as Keith responded to a complaint from the couple he was serving. You tangled gently with Keith, especially (as someone remarked) after 9.20pm when the smiling, witty chef in a bow tie was likely to be subverted by red wine and paranoia.
The debts were cleared by a distress sale, in 1996, and disappearance to Ireland. A fourth marriage followed, to Theresa Smith (which also ended in divorce), and removal to Marbella, before a return to his old haunts in Provence.
A life that seemed punctuated by bankruptcy and bust-ups was nonetheless full of achievement and hard work: 19 series for television, 25 books, as well as countless public appearances, not to mention a good dozen restaurants, including his last venture, Floyd's Brasserie, launched in 2007 at Burasari resort on the Thai island of Phuket. In 2001 he published Out of the Frying Pan: Scenes from My Life; another autobiography, Stirred But Not Shaken, is due for release next month.
Floyd is survived by a son, Patrick, from his first marriage, and a daughter, Poppy, from his second.
• Keith Floyd, cook, born 28 December 1943; died 14 September 2009