Mel and Sue: We quit Bake Off on first day
They said it was too cruel – and ordered bosses to fill the show with ‘sweetness’
MEL Giedroyc and Sue Perkins have revealed that they resigned on their first day of The Great British Bake Off because it was ‘not a kind show’.
The presenters, who co-hosted the popular baking show on the BBC from 2010 until 2016, said the contestants had cameras shoved in their faces and were made to cry.
They told how their tenure on Bake Off nearly didn’t happen and Miss Perkins, 50, said they had to have ‘stiff words’ with producers if they were to stay on the programme.
Miss Giedroyc, 51, said: ‘We wanted to make it kind.
‘That was absolutely our number one priority and on day one we had quite a frank chat with the producers.’
Miss Perkins added: ‘We resigned, basically. Because it was not a kind show. They were pointing cameras in the bakers’ faces and making them cry and saying, “Tell us about your dead gran”.
‘So we had very stiff words about how we wanted to proceed.
‘We’re quite cheesy and homespun and we just want to have a laugh. Who wants to see people crying? I don’t. Especially if you work in television and you know the mechanisms that have been used to make them cry.
‘I made a documentary once about lab chimps,’ Miss Perkins said. ‘The scientist ended up releasing them and he said something profound that makes me think about television a lot: they released the chimps because they weren’t studying the effects of disease, they were studying the effects of stress because they were so unhappy in cages.
‘And I think that about TV. If you take the general public and you don’t make them feel welcome, essentially what the programme is doing is studying the effects of stress, not looking at how they bake.
‘As presenters, you need them to be in good form because that’s when they confide and you have those little moments. So much of Bake Off, the glue of it, was about how the bakers communicated with one another. It was a place of play and sweetness and enjoyment and that’s what I loved about it.’
The pair told Radio Times they only found out the show was moving to Channel 4 in 2017 from the TV. They then decided to quit.
Miss Perkins said: ‘It was painful. It’s a show about cakes and the moment you get tied up in intense feelings you tell yourself to stop being silly. We wish it the best and in return we just wanted them to understand that it would have been hard for us to carry on in those circumstances.
‘There’s no antagonism there. I just think, “If you’re going to let us find out that way [from TV], then we’re not really a team, are we?”.’
Miss Giedroyc added: ‘It was hard, but it was the right time. I think it’s good to leave the party before the sandwiches start to turn up at the corners.’
They were replaced by Noel Fielding, 46, and Sandi Toksvig. Miss Toksvig, 61, will be replaced by Matt Lucas, 46, for the next series.
Mel and Sue, who have known each other for 32 years and met as students at Cambridge University, play assassins in new Sky One comedy Hitmen.