# Ainsley Harriott Ainsley Harriott is a British celebrity chef whose exaggerated grin and suggestive kitchen delivery turned him into an internet meme starting in December 2010, when a photo of him spicing a salad went viral on 4chan's /v/ board. The image became an exploitable template, and later YouTube supercuts from Ainsley's Barbecue Bible pushed his oily catchphrases to a wider audience. ## Overview Ainsley Harriott is a British celebrity chef and television presenter best known for hosting the BBC show Ready Steady Cook[1]. Online, he became a staple of early 2010s meme culture, mostly through a photograph of him grinning wide while sprinkling spice onto a salad, an image 4chan posters compared to a troll face and worse[3]. The still was turned into an exploitable so users could drop Harriott's face into game screenshots, film stills, and album covers. A second stream of Ainsley content came from clips of his 2000s BBC series Ainsley's Barbecue Bible, where his hands-on style and double-entendre patter gave editors an endless supply of material[3]. That same enthusiasm caused real problems for the broadcast version of the show. Viewers wrote in to the BBC accusing him of dipping his fingers into contestants' dishes and setting a bad hygiene example, with council food-safety officers publicly criticising his on-camera habits[1]. ## How It Spread On June 29th, 2012, Reddit user hughi94 launched the /r/AinsleyHarriott subreddit as a home for photoshops and clip edits of the chef[4]. A separate community, /r/ainsleyeveryday, appeared on October 1st, 2014, posting the same white-shirt photo of Harriott once a day until it stopped on March 2nd, 2015[5]. A dedicated Tumblr tag ran alongside these subreddits and helped push edits beyond 4chan[3]. YouTube gave the meme its next lift. On July 2nd, 2013, Daemon Harte uploaded "Ainsley Harriott and his spicy meat," a cut from Ainsley's Barbecue Bible built around his jerk chicken segment, which passed one million views by March 2015[3]. h3h3Productions followed on May 4th, 2014 with "ainsley harriott exe," a supercut of Barbecue Bible innuendo that also cleared a million views inside a year. Filthy Frank folded Harriott's spice-face into a ten-minute version of "gibe de pusi b0ss" on April 19th, 2014, adding another 760,000 views to the pile. Offline, the meme spilled into fan campaigns. A Change.org petition asked the Bank of England to put Harriott on the new £20 note, calling him an "oily god"[2], and Urban Dictionary entries treated him as an in-joke about seducing "the oil squad"[6]. ## How to Use Two Ainsley templates get the most reuse. The first is the salad exploitable, where his grinning face is cut out and pasted over other characters, typically to signal a game, film, or moment is now "his." The second is the oil-in-the-pan shot, often captioned with the line "Looks like it's time to oil up"[6]. Both usually lean on Harriott's suggestive kitchen delivery for the joke, so edits that add a Barbecue Bible audio clip or a cropped grin fit the format cleanly. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What is Ainsley Harriott? Ainsley Harriott is a British celebrity chef and Ready Steady Cook presenter who became an internet meme after a photo of his grinning face went viral on 4chan[1][3]. ### Where did Ainsley Harriott come from? The meme started around December 2010 on 4chan's /v/ board, where users called him "the king of /v/" and turned a salad-spicing photo into an exploitable[3]. ### What does Ainsley Harriott mean? Online, his name is shorthand for suggestive, oily kitchen humor, built on his wide grin and the double entendres cut from Ainsley's Barbecue Bible[3]. ### How do you use Ainsley Harriott? People photoshop his grinning face into game screenshots and posters, or pair the oil-pan photo with the caption "Looks like it's time to oil up"[6]. ### Is Ainsley Harriott still popular? It is a classic 2010s meme with peak activity from 2012 to 2015, including subreddits and YouTube supercuts that each passed a million views[3][4]. ## References 1. [https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-449591/Finger-licking-Ainsley-Harriott-sacked-say-viewers.html]() 2. [https://www.change.org/p/bank-of-england-ainsley-harriot-for-the-new-face-of-the-20-note]() 3. [https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/people/ainsley-harriott]() 4. [https://www.reddit.com/r/AinsleyHarriott/]() 5. [https://www.reddit.com/r/ainsleyeveryday/]() 6. [https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Ainsley%20Harriott]() --- Source: https://meme.com/memes/ainsley-harriott Published by meme.com — The Internet Meme Library