Sue Perkins
‘The man I really loved’
‘We’ve managed to cover up most of Mary Berry’s physical indiscretions,” promises Bake Off host Sue Perkins, refusing all cakes when we meet in a hotel tea room, after 10 weeks filming the smash-hit series. She jokes about the veteran baker’s “vodka habit” and the fact that the programme considered going Amish and eschewing electricity after the scandal of last year’s “Alaskagate”.
It’s very funny – and all untrue. And that’s what I expected about meeting Perkins – it would be one comic riff after another, but that if I asked her anything remotely personal, this famously selfcontained comedienne would clam up. Yet Perkins, scruffy and relaxed, wearing a shirt inevitably decorated with cake motifs, has finally decided to throw off the very private persona she has jealously maintained for decades, and talk about intimate details such as her brain tumour, her desire to adopt after being told she was infertile – and her six-year relationship with a man.
While she certainly spills the beans in her new memoir, she faced some reluctance from publishers about the kind of book she wanted to write: “There’d be this uncomfortable silence, and then there’d be a ‘Well, you should probably write about cakes’ moment,” she recalls. “But I thought, if I’m going to write a book then I’ll just write about things that hopefully everyone can understand: parents, love, bereavement, stupidity, shame.”
Susan Elizabeth Perkins grew up in Croydon (somewhere she describes as “less of a place, more of a punchline”) in the 1970s, the eldest of three siblings. Her father worked for a local car dealer, her mother worked as a secretary. She didn’t exhibit an early talent for showbusiness and was hampered by chronic shyness and a stammer, eventually cured by years of weekly speech and drama lessons.
She was far from a goody-goody – she forced her younger brother to shoplift sweets, and only made an effort in lessons that interested her. A stubborn streak, however, meant that when a careers adviser suggested she should set her sights no higher than a polytechnic, she resolved she would go to Cambridge to study English. She did – which is where she met her longtime comedy partner and Bake Off cohost, Mel Giedroyc.
The teenage Perkins wasn’t sure of her sexuality and had a relationship with a boy called Rob, who was in a school production of Bizet’s Carmen with her. They went out for six years – throughout university – until he confessed he was gay and had slept with other people. The relationship ended with them taking an HIV test on holiday together in Florida.
Perkins has no regrets. “I really loved him. Absolutely,” she says. “Because we shepherded each other through that odd stage of life where you move from your mid-teens to your early twenties. He’s such a good, kind man. To be a gay woman doesn’t necessarily mean you couldn’t have truly loved a man or truly enjoyed sleeping with men. Sometimes I think people are so absolutist and I wanted to pay proper respect to that relationship.”
When Perkins did finally come out to her parents in her twenties, her description of the big event is hilarious. After much deliberation, she rang her mum to say she wanted to come home to tell her something. Her mum, chewing toast, replied in a matter-of-fact manner: “Is it about you being gay?”
“You build up coming out to this horrible moment,” recalls Perkins. “It’s so stressful, there’s so much adrenalin, and there’s so much primal fear – even though I know my parents to be good people – that they’re going to reject you. And then to get that response, I thought: ‘Have I really, really taken myself on this extreme adrenal ride for that?” I was furious. And then delighted, obviously.”
Perkins is now in a relationship with TV presenter Anna Richardson; she effusively describes Richardson as a “glitterball”. What does she mean by that? “Anna’s just so much fun, and [when we met] I was in such a big trough,” she replies. “If you look at my CV, you can’t imagine that person who is permanently gurning over a lemon drizzle could ever feel moments of despair and sadness like everybody else but I really was in a hole. I think she’s just so good at allowing me to have fun, which I am extremely grateful for on a daily basis.”
Perkins had had a lot to deal with before she met Richardson. In the late 1990s, her father had been diagnosed with colon cancer, and while his treatment was successful, it left him depressed for a decade. “We lost him in plain sight,” says Perkins. As a result, Perkins feels strongly that a lot of the metaphors and imagery used around cancer – particularly “battling” it – are inappropriate.
“This is a man who worked so very hard his whole life, in a job he didn’t like, to provide for his family,” she says. “And I think he saw his retirement as this golden age where he was going to play golf and learn German, and he just didn’t. I didn’t realise how strongly I felt about the way that people talk about cancer. Some people don’t survive it well, and the model that a person returns home and their hair grows back and they go around the world doesn’t work. I thought Dad would do that, but after so much chemo, so many CAT scans, he just wanted to stay at home. It just overwhelmed him. He is much better now, but it’s been a very profound family thing.”
Then Perkins had her own health issues. In 2008, while filming The
Supersizers Go Victorian, a BBC series with Giles Coren about the history of food, Perkins was sent for a blood test, and then a scan, which showed she had a tumour of the pituitary gland. While the tumour is benign, the impact on her reproductive hormones meant that she would never have children. When she told her consultant she was gay, however, he replied airily: ‘Well, that makes it easier. You’re infertile.”
“Just when my biological clock started ticking, I found out it was going to be virtually impossible,” says Perkins. “And it was very hard. And not having children in my life pops up a lot, so what I think about now is can I Opening up: Sue Perkins decided it was time to tell all in her autobiography
adopt? Can I foster? The older I get, I have a sense of needing two different generations in my life – old and young. I don’t want my life to just be about me.”
She says she hasn’t discussed adoption with Richardson yet, but that it is something she plans to do when her work-life balance is sorted out. Yet she is busier than ever, particularly with the runaway success of Bake Off. But Perkins admits that she and Giedroyc walked off the set during the first series because of the attempts to manufacture drama, X Factor- style, which had left contestants in tears.
“We felt uncomfortable with it, and we said ‘We don’t think you’ve got the right presenters’,” says Perkins. “I’m proud that we did that, because what we were saying was: ‘Let’s try and do this a different way’ – and no one ever cried again. Maybe they cry because their soufflé collapsed, but nobody’s crying because someone’s going: ‘Does this mean a lot about your grandmother?’ Many of the bakers have sad stories, but guess what? We never touch on any of them.”
In fact, this series of Bake Off – which ends next week – has been relatively quiet, and Perkins wouldn’t have it any other way. “My idea of hell is another dropped cake or an ‘Alaskagate’ [in 2014, one contestant’s pudding melted after it was removed from a fridge by a rival, an act that prompted more than 800 complaints to the BBC]. A good Bake Off for me is just about cakes and nice people – and that’s a successful show.”
‘My idea of hell is another dropped cake or an Alaskagate’
Spectacles by Sue Perkins is published by Penguin, priced £20. To order a copy for £16.99 plus p&p, call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk. The Great British Bake Off is on BBC One on Wednesdays at 8pm