Former “Great British Bake Off” host Sue Perkins says she considered leaving the show after traveling in rural Tibet
First, fans found out that Channel 4 is planning to modernize The Great British Bake Off. And now we have even crazier news! Apparently, former host Sue Perkins considered leaving Bake Off after traveling in rural Tibet a few years ago. (She did leave the show this year after Channel 4 bought the rights to it from the BBC, but clearly the idea had been brewing for some time.)
As she explained in a recent interview with BBC 4 radio, it was all about the contrast. “Four days before I came into the Bake Off tent, I had been with the first family of the Mekong in Tibet. They had no electricity and no running water, and they would have yak butter and barley, and that’s all they ate, and they would meditate and be in bed by six.”
She said it was shocking to come back to hear people “crying because they couldn’t find the packet of marron glacé [in the Bake Off tent].” It sort of makes sense. Perkins just wasn’t sure she could do the show forever.
Perkins added that she does miss the show. “It was a really sweet show, and I loved the crew, and I loved the director, and I loved the bakers, but I sort of loved all of it,” she said of her time. We really loved her, too. Insert sad face here.
Will the show be the same now that it has switched networks? Perkins apparently doesn’t think so. She said at the time of the changeover that she wasn’t going to “go with the dough,” and that she actually would have stayed on as a host if the show had remained on the BBC. (Apparently, she got over the whole Tibet thing.) The former host also said that she knew her fellow co-host, Mel Giedroyc, was going to quit with her. And they didn’t even talk about it!
After being friends for 30 years, Perkins explained, “I didn’t need to ring her and say ‘what are you going to do?’, because I knew what she was going to do — it was merely a question of how we were going to do it.” She added that leaving the show was a “complicated brew,” but at the end of the day, everyone has to do what’s best for them.
Change is good, right?
