Alison Hammond and I first meet in a production kitchen at Pinewood Studios, where she is rinsing a teacup and recounting a near-fall she had moments before. In truth, I hear her before I see her, such is the power of her cackle. Several other women are in the kitchen with her and they, too, are laughing, so the atmosphere is loud and raucous and, for a visitor walking in cold, mildly startling.
It is mid-July. She is filming , an offshoot of the main series that airs in December and is Christmas-themed. The tent, which is attached to the production kitchen, is decorated with baubles.
Through its windows I can see a thin blanket of artificial snow. Hammond is wearing a long purple dress and a face of makeup and seems fit for a party. This is her second year as a presenter, a role she took over from and which has confirmed her position among fans as a national treasure.
Her appointment is the culmination of a hard-won 22-year television career that began when she was cast in the third series of . When she was approached by the team, she warned, “I can’t do anything other than Alison.” To her surprise, the response was positive.
“They were like, ‘Yeah, that’s what we want.’ So I go in and I do me. Isn’t it good?” is filmed in the grounds of a in Berkshire.
The celebrity version is shot immediately afterwards, here on a Pinewood lawn, in a smaller version of the same tent. Presenting both shows involves a gruelling, months-long production schedule, though I see no signs of tiredness in Hammond, whose enthusiasm is boundless in a way I recognise from television, nor in her co-presenter, the comedian , who is typically quieter and more outwardly studied. Hammond characterises her partnership with Fielding as “a seamless, beautiful partnership that just kind of works”.
For a while, I sit in front of a wall of monitors and watch them perform on set together, exploring this or that avenue for comedic content, speaking with the bakers, offering reassurance when something is not quite right. Fielding has described his role on the show as “pastoral”. Hammond agrees.
“It’s about the bakers,” she says, then considers briefly. “You want to kind of keep them calm. And I can, I think.
I’m a calming influence. It’s the care you have with people. And I care.
” is a warm hug of a show and Hammond is a natural hugger. When we are introduced she refers to me as “Mr Journalist” and pulls me into an embrace. Every now and then while I am watching her on the monitors she slips away from filming and appears in front of me, wanting to chat.
Once she comes to tell me the full story of her earlier near-fall. Next she appears to confirm we are to meet again at a later date. “OK, Mr Journalist!” she says when I nod.
Soon after that she turns up holding trays of food meant for the crew. “Bruschetta?” she asks. “A biscuit?” (“We have Alison give out the snacks,” a producer jokes.
) Later, when she has left the set and the atmosphere has become noticeably quieter, but less exciting, I ask the producer what makes Hammond a good presenter. “Sometimes the crew is a bit tired,” she says, “and Alison will walk in and bring everyone up.” She and many others think of Hammond’s remarkable enthusiasm as her biggest professional strength.
“It’s great at work,” the producer says. “But it must be a at home.” a week later in London.
It is a bright hot Friday afternoon. She has spent most of the day in a photo studio honouring press commitments for . Before that she presented an episode of , where she has been working on and off for two decades.
When ’s principal hosts are away, She often fills in, alongside ; since 2020, the pair have presented the show together every Friday. When I greet Hammond now she is warm, but less buoyant than she was in the tent – I notice only a little of her onscreen enthusiasm. Then she slumps in a chair opposite me.
Hammond is 49. In many ways has been life-changing. “I went to Wimbledon the other day,” she says.
“I got invited to Wimbledon. And some random American guy comes up to me and says, ‘Oh my God, are you Alison from the baking show?’” Her first series was a success, but afterwards she “needed to decompress”. It will be the same this year.
“As you go further through the experience you tend to care more.” Last season, she was surprised to cry when the bakers left. “I was like, ‘What is going on?’” I ask why she thinks she was chosen for the role.
“I don’t know,” she says, and then, “I don’t think anyone else wanted to do it.” Later she adds, “Listen, I’ve been talking to the general public for 22 years. It’s what I love.
”(At Pinewood, a longtime Bake-Off staffer told me, “I don’t think even Alison knows how much we wanted her.”) , where Hammond became a reporter in 2002, has brought her to a wide audience. But is different.
“It’s worldwide,” she says. “It’s an institution, bigger than anything I thought I’d do.” Hammond was raised in a council house in , a Birmingham suburb, and has one of the finest Brummie accents on television.
Her parents immigrated, separately, from Jamaica, but did not live together. Her father worked as a bodyguard for Muhammad Ali whenever the boxer visited England (three of his children have “Ali” in their name). She has described him as “a big man with a big presence”, but he was not often around.
“My dad would arrive periodically, show his face, and go back to Jamaica. Which was weird, because he used to pretend he was the best dad in the world.” Still, he was proud of her.
When she visited Jamaica, “He’d drive me around asking people, ‘Do you know who this is?’ And they’d say, ‘That’s your daughter, Mr Hammond.’” In her memoir, , published in 2022, she writes that she does not hold her father’s absence against him. “People are people,” she says now.
“We can’t rely on them.” Hammond says this without ill feeling. Then she adds, “And it didn’t bother me because I had my mum.
” Hammond has written that she was “obsessed” with her mother, Maria, who raised her and a half-brother and half-sister alone. When I bring this up, she says, “I was obsessed, yes,” and also, “I would always be at my bedroom window waiting for her car to come around the corner.” The obsession was reciprocal, she says.
“I think she felt guilty my father wasn’t around, so she would always give me more than my brother and sister, more attention. I was spoiled, because they had theirs around.” Hammond describes her mother as a grafter.
“She had a council house, but she never claimed the dole.” Instead, she held several jobs – as a nurse, a casino cashier, an usherette, a Tupperware manager and a film and TV extra – often simultaneously. She could tell how well her mother was doing by how many boxes of Tupperware she had to climb over in order to reach the bathroom.
On the phone to me, Dermot O’Leary praised Hammond’s work ethic and grit. Hammond says she developed it from her mother, a single parent who was both “mum and dad” and a solo provider. “She worked so hard and she was so good at it.
” Hammond believes that hard work is “in the blood”. In her memoir, she writes it would be impossible not to be positive and full of energy having grown up around her mother. “She used to sing,” she says.
“The house would be filled with laughter. People would come over, she’d cook.” Hammond’s home was often visited by Black women who influenced her – she called them aunties.
“Everybody arrived looking stylish,” she has written. They would listen to reggae, calypso and Abba; furniture would be moved to make way for dancing. She learned a lot, “in the sense of strong women looking after women, women teaching women”.
The house became central to many lives. Even when her mother later became unwell, she “wanted everyone over,” Hammond says. “I was like, ‘You’re , mum.
’ And she was like, ‘Let them come, let them come.’” Her mother was diagnosed with cancer in 2019, and died in 2020, having contracted sepsis. Her father died six months later.
She was with her mother in her final moments. When she eventually left the hospital, at 6am, a fan approached cheerfully and asked for her picture. “I’ll be honest with you,” she writes in her book.
“I wasn’t in the mood to have a photo with this woman. But I thought, You know what? It will make this woman happy. It’ll make her day.
” Hammond obliged. “I smiled in the photo,” she goes on, “but behind the smile there was such sadness.” When I ask about life since her mother’s death, she describes “a huge, gaping hole – still”.
Her mother influenced every part of her life. “I’d go to her about everything” – including men – “and she’d give her opinion. She’d say, ‘He’s not for you, Alison.
He doesn’t bring anything to the table.’” She is now reported to be with a younger man from Russia. Hammond was raised Christian.
When she was young, she was encouraged to have a Bible with her at all times. “Every morning we would have to say ‘Thank you,’” she recalls. “Literally a ‘thank you’ to God for waking us up.
” The practice taught her gratitude, which in turn has encouraged her to “embrace and love life, genuinely.” When I ask what she feels grateful for now, she replies, “For my body. I think my body is incredible.
And I’ve had a baby and he’s very healthy.” Hammond’s son, Aidan, is 19. She split amicably from his father not long after he was born.
Like her mother, she has developed a successful career while raising a child as a single parent, another experience for which she is grateful. Gratitude, she says, has “changed my perspective on everything. You go, ‘Oh, yeah, this a gift.
’” her mother dreamed of becoming an actor and she encouraged her to be one, too. When she was six, she appeared in a film called , in which she can be seen slumped in a car (“We had to pretend to be dead”). She later joined the Central Junior Television Workshop, a drama school in Birmingham, and auditioned for acting parts.
“It was being in front of other people that thrilled me,” she says. “I would just show up in.
