In a highly chequered career Keith Floyd was variously a journalist, an army officer, a bartender, a cook, a restaurateur and finally a celebrity television chef. He made some 20 television series, which have been shown in more than 40 countries, and wrote more than 20 books.

A television show from Floyd could be something of a shambles, undoubtedly entertaining, but leaving the viewer at times with the (not wholly accurate) impression that any end product resembling an edible meal would be a surprise bonus. Floyd all the while revelled in giving the impression that he was making it all up as he went along. The shows were hugely popular. Keith Floyd on . . . became a staple in the televisual diet of viewers in many countries, presenting as it did an anarchic contrast to the well-ordered kitchen world of a Fanny Cradock or a Delia Smith.

Holding it all together was the engaging style and personality of Floyd, with his skew-whiff bow tie and endless fund of anecdotes, barking orders and expletives at cameramen, and the ever-present drink in the hand (quick slugs gave him time to invent his next ad lib, he said, as the shows were unscripted).

Keith Floyd was born at Folly Farm near Reading and brought up in a council house in the Somerset village of Wiveliscombe. His father was an instrument mechanic. With much scrimping and saving at home, he was educated at Wellington School until the money to pay the fees ran out when he was 16. During the summer holidays he worked on farms, on the hay and wheat harvests. His first fulltime job was on the Bristol Evening Post as a junior reporter. The editor, amused by the teenage Floyd’s penchant for handmade suits and bow-ties, began to take him to expensive restaurants.

Times Archive, 1998: 'I've only been drunk on TV once'

Floyd's approach, from the first, has been that food and wine should be enjoyed to the full

• Birthday blues send Floyd's customers running for cover

• Seasoning the fun with a little seriousness

Floyd liked to say that it was the film Zulu starring Michael Caine that prompted him to leave the Post and join the Royal Tank Regiment. Whatever his motivation, he served for three years and attained the rank of second lieutenant. Floyd nights in the officers’ mess were memorable: he persuaded the cook to experiment and produced, rather than plain roast lamb and two veg, a more exotic gigot d’agneau romarin.

After various jobs in London and France as a barman, dishwasher and general kitchen boy, he opened his first restaurant, Floyd’s Bistro, in Bristol. He was 23. It was a great success but, like many of his future ventures, including three more restaurants in Bristol, it was beset by difficuties and failed to generate much in the way of surplus cash. By 1971 he also owned a film-location catering service, a take-away and a dial-a-dinner concern.

“The trouble was”, he recalled in 1989, “that I had no real head for business. It just wasn’t my way to charge for a portion of butter or a roll, although you’ve got to do that to survive.”

Depressed by the failure of his first marriage and the collapse of one of his businesses, Floyd sold up, bought a yacht called Flirty and sailed around the Mediterranean for a couple of years, during which time he exported French wine to England and imported English antiques to France. Eventually he opened a restaurant near Avignon and that too failed to make much profit.

Rescue came when, back in Bristol in charge of yet another restaurant, Floyd was accosted by David Pritchard, a features editor at BBC Plymouth. Through Pritchard, Floyd was catapulted to fame in 1985 after recording a pilot television show, Floyd on Fish. When it made the national network Floyd found himself in demand for fêtes, shows and personal appearances. It also led to an enormous demand for lemon sole at fishmongers across the country.

His first book appeared the following year and was soon followed by his second television series, Floyd on Food. Not long afterwards came Floyd on France, Floyd on Fire and Floyd on Oz, which regaled viewers with the delights of Antipodean cuisine, all served up in the regularly chaotic Floyd style. A total of 19 Floyd television series were produced, conveying his quixotic take on the cuisines of America, Italy, Africa, India, Britain, Ireland and the Mediterranean. Broadcast as far afield as Kuwait, Japan and Bulgaria, each programme was said to attract 4 million viewers. Floyd claimed that the shows were broadcast in the Middle East as educational aids to help the locals to improve their English. Perhaps his most unusual television assignment was as the voice of a cartoon bear for Max Bear, the Channel 4 children’s series.

However, fearing that life as a television personality might be a shortlived, he diversified and bought The Maltsters Arms at Tuckenhay, near Totnes, Devon, in 1991, which he renamed Floyd’s Inn on account of his sporadic appearances there. It was a colourful period in which Floyd took against his staff (“stupid”) and many of his customers (“thick and snobbish and as stupid as you can get”), on one occasion throwing 50 of them out, including his third wife, who had allegedly forgotten his birthday. Such behaviour could only lead to disaster. Trade may have been brisk, and the restaurant was one of the handful awarded the coveted Michelin red M-rating. But it was perhaps the wrong place and the wrong time for the sort of operation that Floyd had in mind, and the business failed to recover its early losses. Last orders were finally called when the pub was repossessed in 1996; not long afterwards Floyd was declared bankrupt after personally guaranteeing the drinks order.

Such was his television appeal that when Clive James defected from ITV to BBC Two, Floyd seemed the obvious choice to replace him on LWT’s popular Sunday-night look at television from around the world, which was renamed Floyd on TV. Unfortunately Floyd was not comfortable reading a script from an autocue, and would have preferred the opportunity to ad lib spontaneously, something the producers were, perhaps sensibly, disinclined to risk. He was dropped after just one series. By 2007, while his shows continued to air round the world, Floyd’s only appearance on terrestial UK television was during the “Floyd in Provence” slots on the ITV show This Morning.