My single friends are always asking if my husband has a twin brother. My next business should be a dating agency for oldies. It would be a smash!
documentary maker and Daniel was a speechwriter for David Cameron, responsible for the ‘hug a hoodie’ phrase. He now runs a charity for ex-offenders.)
After a long illness Rayne died of emphysema in 2002, when Prue was 62. Unhappy and in mourning, she thought the chapter of her life called romance had closed forever.
‘When he was really ill during the last few years of his life, I just thought that the sex part of my life was definitely over. I just did not feel any desire at all, not for other people, not for him. I just felt affectionate and loving.’
The last thing she expected was a renaissance of lust. Yet four years after Rayne died she fell in love with an old friend, businessman Sir Ernest Hall. It had been ten years since she had sex and as she points out in Relish, ‘no sexual gratification could compensate for the embarrassment that undressing would have brought.’
Yet their romance lasted for three years; they even planned to marry. ‘He was wonderful,’ she says today. ‘I did fall totally in love with him and wouldn’t have missed it for the world.’ When they threw a mutual birthday party at his home in
Lanzarote, she thought life was perfect — yet a month later she was gone. ‘I walked out on him. Poor Ernest had really bad bipolar. I said to him, I can’t do this unless you keep taking your medication.’ He didn’t, they had a terrible quarrel and she left. PRUE
has been a mother, cook, restaurateur, businesswoman, novelist and broadcaster — and she has made a success of them all, one brilliant career folding seamlessly into the next.
She joined Bake Off when it moved from BBC1 to C4 in 2017, when few believed that this posh, bespectacled woman who seized the pastry halo from the sainted Mary Berry would be a hit. Yet viewers took to her, proving there is no business like choux business.
Last week’s finale drew a live audience of nearly seven million, but there are problems. The addition of something called a ‘dairy week,’ Paul Hollywood’s fake huff when he stormed off the set (plus his remarks about diabetes), a strange lack of older female contestants and over- elaborate bakes in the technical challenges are just a few of the complaints about this year’s series.
‘Paul wasn’t being serious. He is a joker, is Paul. And I know that people sometimes say we’re getting too complicated but if we just made sponge cakes all the time they would be bored,’ rebuts Prue. ‘Channel 4 are always so careful about gender and age things. I honestly don’t know if it was an oversight but it certainly wouldn’t have been intentional to exclude women.’
She quotes positive statistics about audience share and says fewer people are watching television generally — but viewers do seem less engaged with the show this year. For many of us, the gilt may be of f the Bake Off gingerbread for ever, but Prue is not leaving any time soon. ‘ I’m too competitive. Mary Berry was on it for seven years.
I have done three, so I have to do another four at least.’
She only watches the programme if Johnny insists, because she absolutely hates seeing herself on television.
‘I am so vain,’ she wails. ‘All I can do is look at myself and think my gosh, she’s got too many chins. I look at my neck and go “owwww”. I think, do I look better smiling or not? Then the camera goes around the back and films all my fat places. It is a torture.’ SHE
had her eyes done when she was 50 (‘I had these Irene Handl bags under my eyes. I looked like Nora Batty’), but thinks that women have more interesting faces if they have lived a bit. ‘It is a different kind of beauty. I prefer it when they have a bit of lines on their faces and they are not all filled to hell. I have seen too many women who look like aliens.’
If she could wave a magic wand and look 20 years younger? ‘I’d probably do it. But what I tell myself is that Bake Off has been a huge success and people are really nice about me. They know what I look like from every angle and they don’t mind. So why the hell should I? My husband loves me and he sees me first thing in the morning, with no slap on at all.’
The biggest beneficiary of the Prue Leith effect seems to be Prue Leith herself, despite her admission that ‘I can no longer pretend to be middle-aged, I am old. I will be 80 soon.’ Yet in her case, living a younger life is all about attitude. She believes that a lot of older women ‘just think about themselves wrong’. That they should not be content ‘in the backseat’ or give themselves over to grannydom.
‘Fine if you love it, but it doesn’t have to be your entire role.’
It is not something she excelled at herself.
‘Sometimes you have to do your granny duty and get strong-armed into watching a play or ballet or something, but I draw the line at the touchline. I’m not going to ever watch a rugby match in the freezing cold. I didn’t do it with my children and I am not going to do it now,’ she says.
What should older women be doing? ‘They should be having a bit of fun. Carve out a bit of me time. Say I’m going off to Spain, I’m going dancing, I’m buying a new wardrobe. A colourful wardrobe.’
We talk about the one non-black item in my wardrobe, a mint green coat I bought in a moment of madness. ‘Wear it,’ orders Prue. No, I argue. It is too loud. I don’t want to look like a Liquorice Allsort. I feel self-conscious.
‘Self- conscious is one way of putting it. Strutting your stuff is another. Jan, promise me you will wear it. Be the lady in the loud coat! Why ever not?’