Leith gives the game away in Bake Off finale
‘Mortified’ judge says sorry for accidentally revealing winner’s name in a tweet hours before show aired
In another first for Channel 4 and its ownership of The Great British Bake Off, Prue Leith, one of the judges, let slip the identity of the winner on Twitter before the show was broadcast. The result had been one of the best kept secrets in television, until, 11 hours too early, Leith congratulated Sophie Faldo on social media.
IT WAS a moment that millions had waited for: the final of The Great Brit- ish Bake Off, with Sophie Faldo crowned the ultimate star baker.
But what should have been the best-kept secret in television was given away by Prue Leith, one of the show’s judges, who accidentally revealed the winner on Twitter 11 hours too early.
“No one told me judging a GBBO final would be so emotional. I wanted them all to win. Bravo Sophie,” she wrote, in a tweet sent at 10.37am. She swiftly deleted it on realising her mistake, but the cat was out of the bag. Leith blamed the gaffe on the fact she is in Bhutan and mixed up her time zones.
“I f---ed up,” she told the Press Association, clearly upset, before issuing a public apology on Twitter: “I am so sorry to the fans of the show for my mistake this morning. I am in a different time zone and mortified by my error.”
It was a head-in-hands moment for executives at Channel 4, who until then had been celebrating the success of the show they took from the BBC for £75 million.
At a recent leaving party for David Abraham and Jay Hunt, the broadcaster’s chief executive and head of programmes, Noel Fielding, one of the new Bake Off presenters, joked in a speech that everyone had expected the show to be a disaster but the broadcaster had pulled it off. The final was filmed in the summer and everyone involved in the production, including the contestants, signed strict confidentiality agreements banning them from disclosing the name of the winner.
Faldo beat Steven Carter-bailey, the bookies’ favourite, and Kate Lyon to win the Bake Off trophy. It is customary for the winner to dissolve into tears when their name is announced. But Faldo, a former officer in the Royal Artillery who trained at Sandhurst and completed a seven-month tour of Helmand Province in Afghanistan from 2009, remained dry-eyed.
“I do keep my emotions under control, so there wasn’t really a point in the tent that I would burst into tears. It wasn’t going to happen at the end of the final either, because if anything it was a relief,” she said.
She had been consistently good, earning the series’ first “Hollywood handshake”, although that was cut out of the broadcast to make it appear that Carter-bailey was the one to beat.
“On TV it was edited so it looked like Steven got the first one, but it was actually me,” she said.
Her showstopper was a triumph: a multi-layered mousse cake known as an entremet, titled Ode to the Honey Bee and featuring honey custard, blackberry jelly, lemon curd and lavender mousse. Leith said: “absolutely stunning”. Carter-bailey failed at the final hurdle with an “unappetising” cake.
Faldo was the subject of unwelcome headlines this week when claims emerged that she was being investigated over housing benefits. She said any suggestion of fraud was “categorically untrue”. She now hopes to write a patisserie book.
‘I am so sorry to the fans of the show for my mistake… I am mortified by my error’