Sue Perkins
I’m guessing that Sue Perkins might be a teensy bit tired of answering questions about The Great British Bake Off. Before our telephone interview to chat about her memoir, Spectacles, her press agent emails to say: “She's really proud of it, and will want to talk about this rather than anything Bake Off. Thanks!”
OK. To be honest, I’m about as interested in baking as I am in oil rigs, and I’ve never actually seen the show. But I really ought to ask her something about it, given that it’s what she’s best-known for (and the reason, she writes in Spectacles, that she can’t go anywhere without someone yelling ‘BAAAKE!’ in her face).
It gets worse. When Sue calls, she opens with a slightly spiky: “You’re probably going to ask me scintillating questions that have nothing to do with what I think of Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood.” Yikes. “I am!” I soothe (knowing full well I’ll be lobbing in a cake-related question at some point).
But even if I was a Bake Off mega-fan - and my goodness, I know some – I’d still be giving Spectacles my full focus.
Heart-warming and heartbreaking, it’s an emotional rollercoaster of a memoir and an absolute gem - I read it in two greedy chunks, laughing, crying, and annoying my other half by reading bits aloud. And, trying not to gush, I tell her how much I loved it. She’s almost lost for words. “Oh, that is so… That is incredibly meaningful. Thank you very much,” she says, all spikiness abandoned.
But given that she’s a comedian, did she intend it to have so many sad bits? “Personally I don’t think you can write about life honestly if it’s just gags,” replies the 46-year-old. “And how do you know something’s properly funny unless you’ve gone through some shit as well?
“A lot of memoirs tend to be CVs these days, and that’s the sort of thing that I’m interested in least - the ‘when’ you did something. I like the ‘why’, so it’s an emotional story rather than just a series of events.”
Growing up in 1970s Croydon (“twinned with Mordor”), Sue is at her funniest when describing her delightfully chaotic early years. But brace yourself to be tear-jerked: it happens when you’re least expecting it. Take pets. One minute she’s describing the ‘quality time’ she spent with her gerbils, ‘grabbing them from their slumber and squeezing their back end till their eyes bulged’, then suddenly we’re on to Pog the neighbourhood cat, who kept her dad company during his gruelling treatment for cancer. A few weeks after he gets the all-clear, Pog takes herself off to die. ‘We never got the chance to thank her’, she writes, ‘or to let her know that any one of us would have happily lain next to her, like she did with Dad, in her hour of need’.
Told you.
As a schoolgirl, terribly shy and with a mild stammer, Sue yearned to perform but couldn’t bring herself to do anything daring on stage. Cambridge University changed all that, of course. It was here that she found her funny bone, eventually becoming Footlights president.
Yet she might not have studied here at all if her (seriously rubbish) careers advisor had had her way. “Instead of being told I was going to be a secretary, which everyone else had been told, she said that maybe a career as a dentist might be a good thing,” recalls Sue. “I didn’t really know what career I wanted at that time, but dentistry wasn’t high up on the list. I have no aptitude for science, and very little interest in dental hygiene. Or teeth. Or causing pain to complete strangers.
“I was also told that I couldn’t be a creative person, and I certainly couldn’t do English at university, so I went home and said to my dad: ‘What’s the best university?’ I remember him very clearly watching Grandstand, and going ‘I’ve got no idea. I think it’s one of the rowing ones. I think it’s Cambridge.’
“And that’s why I applied. I applied because nobody at school had any ambition for me, so I suppose I thought it was high time I had some for myself.”
Arriving at New Hall (now renamed Murray Edwards College) in 1988 – to read English, of course – it was during her very first week that Sue decided to go and see some comedy at the Footlights club room in the basement of the Cambridge Union.
“I certainly wasn’t expecting to do an open spot,” she insists, “but my friend Shayla dared me a tenner, which was a fortune back then.” Totally unprepared, her routine consisted of wry observations about the journey she’d just taken from college to club room, “and I was terrible! I had a very hot jumper on, and I was in a subterranean sweatbox, and I was distinctly underwhelming. But it was a redeemable gig if only for the fact that Mel was there that evening, and the rest is… mediocrity.”
Sue spent almost all of her Cambridge days in said sweatbox (described in the book as having ‘a perma-stink of booze, fags, fun and shame – the key notes of any comedic perfume’). “I think that you’re always looking for your tribe, and I found mine creeping around in an underground bunker with no fresh air or light,” she says. “And some of those people I remain extremely close to today.”
None more so than Mel Giedroyc. After graduating, they formed a double act and took a show to Edinburgh, treating the first performance as a dress rehearsal (“We hadn’t meant to, it was just that no-one had turned up”). By show two they had an audience. Of one. Undeterred, they stuck at it, eventually landing a presenting role on new Channel 4 show Late Lunch in 1997.
Why Mel? Sue pauses. “We have the same sort of values: we want to be nice to people, and we have a very strong sense of family and friendship. But there’s also the fact that we both have a mental age of around 4, and we just like pratting around. When I’m with her, the person I most want to laugh is her, and then all’s right with the world.”
The memoir covers everything you would expect - shows she’s been involved with, coming out as a lesbian – and plenty that you wouldn’t: the tumour on her pituitary gland that’s neither life-threatening nor painful, but means she can’t have children; her midlife crisis; her much-loved beagle, Pickle, whose demise, I admit to Sue, had me in floods.
“It still catches me,” she says. “There’s a picture of her above my desk - she’s looking down on me as if to say ‘Oh God, you again! - and I have quite long, involved conversations with her. Everyone needs a Pickle.”
She includes a heart-rending letter written to her beloved pooch, admitting to signing the forms to have her put down (‘I ticked boxes as you lay wheezing in your sleep on the bed next door’, she writes). “I was in so much shock,” explains Sue. “I was hosting a radio show, and I did it in a complete disassociated state, and I came back and I thought ‘There’s going to be no Pickle jumping up and squealing and going ‘Wahay!’.’ It was silent, and I couldn’t bear it, and I poured myself a glass of wine and wrote that.
“I think probably people have this impression of me as a smartarse in a blazer, but actually I’m pathetic and emotional, and that’s part and parcel of me.”
Comedy fans won’t be disappointed, though, as the funny anecdotes come thick and fast: there’s the road rage incident featuring Esther Rantzen and a very naughty word; the car journey from hell with her partner (Channel 4 presenter Anna Richardson) and a vomiting, diarrhoea-ridden dog; the rampant gorillagram who dangled his sweaty crotch in her face, moaning ‘Mel, oh Mel…’ Does she have a favourite? “I enjoyed reliving the gorillagram. I say I enjoyed reliving it, it was absolutely horrific reliving it.”
There’s more jollity in the Bake Off chapter, in which rum-addled Mary ‘Bezza’ Berry ‘says very little, but sets her lazer eyes to either ‘I love you’ or ‘I’m going to kill you’,’ while Paul Hollywood styles his hair with an unmentionable bodily fluid; what’s more, she writes, ‘their love affair is one of the worst-kept secrets in showbusiness’…
Aha! So here’s my chance for a surreptitious Bake Off question: is the jokiness because she can’t bear talking about it anymore? “No!” she exclaims. “I’m incredibly fortunate to do that show and I never, ever, ever take that for granted. But so much has been written about Bake Off that I just wanted to do something different, as opposed to the normal focus of conversation, which is ‘What do the cakes taste like?’ And ‘Are Paul and Mary awful or amazing?’
“Also I thought it might be interesting to talk about how the show came about, and the judging process,” she adds, referring to the final of the first series, which saw Paul and Mary wrestling over their decision for a whopping four-and-a-half hours. “I was just literally on my knees going ‘End it! Put a name in the hat!’ But they really had to talk it through, and ultimately that’s why people like the show - because it’s got integrity.
“So I hope the chapter comes across that I’ve got so much love for them, but at the end of the day I wanted to give Bake Off fans something they’d never read before, which was a mixture of fantastical piss-take and the genuine behind-the-scenes evolution of the show.”
With the marquee packed away for another series, Sue’s currently concentrating on her book tour. She says she “can’t wait” to come to Cambridge, then sheepishly admits that it’s not a trip she makes very often. “Some places hold such sway in your heart that it’s quite wistful to go back. And Cambridge was such a profound and important part of my life, it’s joyful and painful at the same time to go back, because I feel very strongly connected with the person that I was at 19.
“But you’ve got me all fired up about coming now,” she says. “I’ve never done a book signing: everything I’ve done has been in the context of being a presenter, not a writer, and I’m so genuinely really properly excited about it.
“It’s starting to feel like delivering a weird child into the world,” she adds. “People are going to peer into the pram and go ‘Urgh, she’s a bit deformed’, or ‘She’s not what I expected!’ But I feel incredibly protective of it because it’s not just a book, it’s my life. And I want people to think ‘She did OK’.”
Spectacles by Sue Perkins is published by Michael Joseph, priced £20.