Delia Smith has announced her retirement from TV cookery shows.
The 71-year-old has decided to step back from television work following the end of her contract to promote supermarket chain Waitrose, the Radio Times reports.
"As soon as my Waitrose contract ended, the BBC called me up and said, 'What can we do?' And I said, 'No, thank you' - I am afraid to say this is the end when it comes to Delia on the telly," said Smith.
The television host and author will now focus on her online cooking tutorial series Delia Online Cookery School - citing television's need to "entertain" as one of the reasons for her retirement from the medium.
"If you do a TV programme now, it's got to entertain," she explained. "When I started, there was further education in the BBC; now you have to entertain. You have someone telling me I haven't got time to show this, or I haven't got time to show that."
Smith first rose to fame hosting cookery show Family Fare between 1973 and 1975. Her last television work was the five-part 2010 retrospective Delia Through the Decades.
