With no formal training as a cook he ran a restaurant in Hampstead in the 1930s and had charge of a major airline's test kitchens in the 1940s, before being spotted by the BBC and given his own series on radio from 1943 and television from 1946.

His parents – Hubert Harben and Mary Jerrold – were actors, and his younger sister, Joan, joined the profession, becoming celebrated as Mona Lott in the BBC radio series It's That Man Again (ITMA).

The club, described as "a poor man's food and wine society", offered its twenty-five members and their guests dinner for a modest price per head.

[2] He joined the British Overseas Airways Corporation, taking charge of its test kitchens, creating, from the scarce, rationed ingredients available, dishes suitable to be served to Allied war leaders and others during intercontinental flights.

When television resumed in Britain, after being suspended during the war, Harben made his screen debut in June 1946 in the first of a series called Cookery which ran until March 1948.

Like the earlier radio programmes it focused on basic techniques and making the best use of scarce ingredients (food rationing became even more stringent in the early post-war years than it had been at the height of the war).

On one occasion he cracked an egg that was so bad that he had to abandon the demonstration amid his own and the studio crew's helpless laughter, and on another he reached the last moments of the programme to discover that he had forgotten to switch the oven on for the dish he was meant to be cooking.