Willie's Wonky Chocolate Factory

From deep inside a converted chicken shed, on the edge of the Devon countryside, a symphony of strange noises is emerging. First thing you hear is an insistent pounding, like the sound of an elephant on a treadmill. Then there’s a tortured squeaking, like a train on rusting wheels. And finally a frenzied shaking and sifting, as if some member of a samba band has gone mad with the maracas.

Welcome to the deliciously dotty and cacophonous world of Willie Harcourt-Cooze, the man who, in his bid to produce the world’s most perfect chocolate, says he’s prepared to move heaven and earth.

It sounds like he’s doing just that as his antiquated machines turn out yet another deafening consignment of his extraordinary, 100 per cent pure cocoa-bean chocolate. Willie’s chocolate is too strong to be eaten neat. Instead, you employ it as a flavouring or concentrate.

Look in most sweet shops and your average bar of milk chocolate will contain perhaps 20 per cent cocoa solids. However, “average” isn’t a word that appears in the Harcourt-Cooze vocabulary, as viewers of Willie’s Wonky Chocolate Factory are going to discover over the next four weeks.

For not only does this inexhaustible entrepreneur single-handedly manufacture the chocolate in the factory he rents just outside Tiverton in Devon, but he also grows his own cocoa beans on the farm he owns outside the town of Choroni in tropical Venezuela.

It’s there, in fact, that we find him for much of the first part of the series, along with his wife Tania (a former actress who appeared in the video for the 1988 George Michael single Father Figure), and their three children, aged four to 12. It’s hot and they’re all tired from travelling, but more importantly the couple have sunk all their worldly possessions into first buying the Venezuelan farm (which they did 13 years ago), and now setting up their UK factory. And while Willie spouts off about the quality of cocoa beans, Tania talks rather more tensely about what it’s like to have your husband go off for days on end into the wilds of Venezuela, where mobile phones don’t work.

Back in Devon, however, perched beside him on a pile of cocoa bean sacks, Tania looks more relaxed. “The children do catch all sorts of things out there,’’ she says, ‘including jungle fevers, where their body temperatures go up to 41°C, but we’ve always been able to treat them with a mixture of the local people’s ancient herbal knowledge, plus my own interest in homeopathy.

“Whenever they go down with something, all the guys who work on our farm rush off into the forest and come back holding a plant.”

It’s not just finding medicinal herbs and bark that the staff are good at, either. “When we had a 100-kilo boa constrictor hanging around the house, we got the men to go and feed it frogs in order to keep it docile,” recalls Willie. “That’s the great thing about the area around El Tesoro [his farm]; it houses three per cent of the world’s total animal population, and seven per cent of the planet’s plants. Such incredible biodiversity.”

That’s the good news. The bad news is that the area is prone to sudden flooding, and the cocoa harvest to the occasional plague of butterflies and caterpillars. Not surprisingly, Willie’s lovely warm chocolate dreams are frequently interrupted by calls from the cold, hard world of finance, where gimlet-eyed accountants are more interested in balance sheets than chocolate wrappers.

But although the cocoa solids are forever threatening to hit the fan, Willie remains cheerfully resolute. Not that this is due to some kind of aristocratic insouciance. Although his exotic name hints at Eton and Oxbridge, his upbringing was dirt-poor and Irish. “We grew up shoeless, in hand-me-downs,” he recalls. “We grew and made everything ourselves. My dad could turn his hand to anything – from farming to building to engineering, you name it.”

By contrast, Tania was born into the English aristocracy, and is a direct descendant of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. She and Willie met at 18, but it wasn’t till ten years later that they fell in love. She had become tired of the modelling and acting career she had gone to pursue in Los Angeles; he had been through a number of jobs in London, the last of which had been running a Soho nightclub called 41 Beak Street (they hosted Mick Jagger’s 49th birthday party).

“Originally, we went off to Venezuela for a three-week holiday, because Willie said it was the most beautiful place in the world,” says Tania. “It is, but I had no idea we’d still be there more than a decade later.”

Still less idea that they’d be shuttling three children back and forth between South America and south-west England.

“But it’s the children we’re doing all this for,” protests Willie. “After all, this whole chocolate-making business is how we’re going to feed them. And I’ve no doubt that we’re going to make a success of it; I’m a doer, always have been; it’s how my father taught me to be. At the same time, though, there’s a certain amount of crazy in me. I’m 43, but so far I seem to have bitten off more than most people can chew in a lifetime!”