UK Edition
Sue Perkins: I considered leaving Bake Off after someone cried over candied chestnuts
Sue Perkins, the former host of the Great British Bake Off, has disclosed how she considered leaving the programme after returning from a trip with impoverished Tibetans to find a contestant crying because they had lost a packet of candied chestnuts.
Perkins, who hosted the BBC show with Mel Giedroyc, said she had been left incredulous at the culture clash, after returning to the tent in 2014.
The broadcaster said she had been left wondering whether she could carry on with the baking show, and “rationalise” it with the poverty she had seen while travelling to the Mekong River for a BBC travel show.
Perkins and Giedroyc have now left the Bake Off along with Mary Berry, while judge Paul Hollywood moves with it to Channel 4 later this year.
Speaking on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, Perkins said she did not need to consult her co-host over their decision, with both of them reaching the same conclusion not to “follow the dough” immediately.
Asked whether she felt leaving the show was a wrench or relief, she said: “It’s complicated brew, actually, that.
“I think we were running out of puns. I’m not going to lie, there were only so many in the tank. Every bap pun, every Hungarian ring pun, was just mined and mined and mined.
“But I would have carried on doing it, I think. It was a really sweet show, I loved all of it.
“There was one point, I will be honest, where I did think: can I do this forever?
“Four days before I came to the Bake Off tent I had been with the first family of the Mekong in Tibet, who had no electricity and running water, and they would have yak butter and barley and that was all they ate.
“They would meditate and be in bed by six.
“Four days later, I was in a tent where somebody was crying because they couldn’t find the packet of marron glacé.
“And did think, how can I rationalise these two worlds?”
She added: “But I miss it, and I also wish it well. There’s no point in rancour.” Mary Berry has previously lamented the tendency of contestants to burst into tears during baking challenges.
“In life you shouldn’t keep bursting into tears,” she has said previously. “There are occasions when you want to cry your heart out, but not on a television programme.
“If you do something that doesn’t work out, you have to gather yourself up and keep going.”
Perkins also spoke of her health, and a benign brain tumour discovered during medical tests for a television show nine years ago which affects her hormones and behaviour.
Describing a "very, very dark time", she said the effects of the illness led her to "literally destroy my life from the inside out", leaving a relationship and "walking out" of what she knew.
"I'll never understand how i did some of the things I did," she said, adding that she had not possessed enough "self-love" to treat the tumour and its effects seriously.
When her autobiography came out in 2015 and the public learned of her diagnosis, she said, she had only just found out her own father had a terminal brain tumour.
"The best thing i can do to honour him [her father] is to at least get myself sorted," she told the programme, of her happier life and relationship today.
The interview will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 today.