How Noel Fielding went from a hedonist to a host of ‘The Great British Baking Show’
FROM PARTYING with Amy Winehouse to dancing with his daughter, Dali
LONDON — Noel Fielding paused at a cartoon of Amy Winehouse.
“I used to hang out with her,” he said, gazing at the sketch in the Cartoon Museum. “It’s so sad. God, if I’d died at 27, I would have missed out on so much.”
Back in the mid2000s, when he and Winehouse were deep in the drugsoaked North London party scene, Fielding, a comedian, would never have predicted how he spends most of his time today: hosting “The Great British Baking Show” and hanging out with his daughter.
“It kind of gets better as you get older, in a weird way,” he said. Back then “it was all crazy and fast. It reminds me of a different person really.”
When Fielding signed on a few years ago to host the “Baking Show” (known as “The Great British Bake Off ” in Britain), he was still famous as that hedonistic person: Britain’s most charming goth; a poster boy for weirdos everywhere, thanks to his show “The Mighty Boosh.”
Unlike the shows Fielding frequented, the “Baking Show” has always aired before British TV’S 9 p.m. watershed for “offensive content,” creating a pastel world appropriate for viewers of all ages. After seven seasons, it was moving from the BBC to Channel 4 and replacing the hosts, Mel Giedroyc and Sue Perkins. (Season 10 is currently airing in Britain; on American Netflix, where it’s known as Collection 7, new episodes arrive on Fridays.)
When Fielding was announced as one of their replacements, the tabloids’ reactions made him think he’d just ruined his career. “Can you believe this is the new face of Bake Off ?” asked the front page of the Daily Mail under a photo of Fielding wearing eyeliner, necklaces and a mullet.
On “The Mighty Boosh,” one of the strange and beautiful characters he played was a merman who shot light out of his “mangina.” The naughtiest comedy on “Bake Off ” came from doubleentendres about a cake’s “soggy bottom.”
On their first day of filming, he and his cohost, Sandi Toksvig, felt as if they were “going to the gallows,” Fielding said, the fear of ruining a beloved show weighed heavily.
For Fielding, accepting the job meant reframing the way he saw himself and his work. “Unfortunately for me, I did go to art school, and I do have that snobby art school cool thing,” he said.
But he loved the “Baking Show,” having become a fan when he binged an entire season during a terrible hangover.
Three seasons in, Fielding has proved the doomsayers wrong: Fans of the
“Baking Show” have more than accepted him and Toksvig (and Prue Leith, who replaced Mary Berr y as Paul Hollywood’s cojudge). The opening sketches have become weirder, and the banter with the bakers has become loaded with a few more innuendos about sexuality. He also subdues his zaniness to avoid distracting from the bakers.
“You end up going a bit stir crazy in the tent,” he explained: Day after day, little on the show changes besides the faces behind the stations. Talking to the contestants is his favorite part of the job; his role as part therapist, part friend, part clown, keeping things loose, comforting bakers when cakes collapse.
He knows nothing about baking, although Hollywood did once show him how to bake a loaf of bread. (“It was like that scene in ‘Ghost’ with Demi Moore,” Fielding said.) He framed the recipe Hollywood wrote out and hung it in his kitchen, but he hasn’t been tempted to attempt another bake.
When Fielding became a father a year and a half ago, everything shifted again. “I didn’t really count on the fact that once I had a baby I’d want to hang out with them all the time,” he explained. He has writing projects at various production stages — a children’s book, a film, a Netflix show — but all have taken a back seat to dancing to ’80s music with his daughter, Dali (named after Salvador Dalí).
As seen in his most popular work, Fielding functions best as part of a team, playing off the energy of others. His dynamic with Toksvig works, he said, because “she’s quite male and I’m quite female.” Toksvig — who is a lesbian, founded her own political party and has written more than 20 books — is also his goto source off the air if there’s something in politics that he needs explained.