The Great British Bake Off almost looked very different when it returned to our screens last month – it nearly lacked large statement jewellery , scarlet lipstick and primary-coloured glasses. For if the show’s most colourful judge Prue Leith had had her way, she wouldn’t have been there at all. “It wasn’t that I wasn’t enjoying Bake Off,” she says.
“I love it. But I needed a summer holiday.” So she wrote to producer Richard McKerrow and said: “You know I love you dearly but I’m going.
” However, Prue and Richard were due to see each other at the Cyprus wedding of fellow judge Paul Hollywood last year. So Richard suggested they discuss the matter properly when they met. “And we sat by the swimming pool and he said, ‘Why don’t you just do less and we’ll make sure you get a summer holiday ?’” His compromise means that Prue, 84, will no longer present the show’s charity spin-off, The Great Celebrity Bake Off.
Would she have missed Bake Off if they had let her go? “No, no, no, I love Bake Off but it’s not my whole life,” says Prue, though she concedes that the competition has changed things. “It has given me eight years of enormous pleasure,” she grins. “And of course it’s given me lots of money, which is very helpful.
” And it’s clear she enjoys the company of the show’s presenters Noel Fielding and Alison Hammond , not to mention her fellow judge, Paul. “Every summer, I know I’m going to have a lot of fun because I wil.
