Prue Leith: People keep asking if the next Bake Off will be my last – probably because I'm so old

Telegraph

12-04-2025

How do famous names spend their precious downtime? In our weekly My Saturday column, celebrities reveal their weekend virtues and vices. This week: Prue Leith
8am
My husband John is naughty because he'll bring me tea and yogurt and I'll be furious because I won't be able to resist eating it. I don't usually have breakfast as it's about the only food I can resist and I have a problem keeping my weight remotely down. When I'm filming my Cotswold Kitchen series at home, I'm woken by Bambi, my makeup artist, banging on my door.
9am
I choose the necklace or specs first and the outfit around that. I've got necklaces on a wall hanging up so I can see them – it's all cheap stuff, never gold. I enjoy putting my clothes together, but John buys them all. I hate shopping.
10am
We've got a new potting shed and greenhouse and I'm thrilled. It's full of plants I had in childhood in South Africa, like bright bougainvillaea. I like propagating because my back hurts and I can do it on a high stool. I'm not as hands-on as I'd like because I'm no longer able to be. I find it vaguely surprising I can't do certain things any longer.
12pm
We go for a jaunt. It's a pretty drive to the Vegetable Matters farm shop where, if you buy a cabbage, it's been picked that morning. For lunch, the Ebrington Arms near Chipping Campden does great steak and chips.
2pm
I have a singing lesson. I can't tell you how wildly out of my comfort zone The Masked Singer was [Prue was in the latest series], but I wanted to learn to sing. The first time I had to rehearse as Pegasus, I sang without the costume and I can't say I was doing dance moves, but at least I was moving around the stage. Then, when I had the horse's head on, I couldn't move or hear the director telling me when to come in, so I just stood there looking like an idiot. I still don't know if I'm in tune, but at least I can make a noise now and I'm confident enough to try.
3pm
Since Covid, I've been having a siesta. I've got my husband addicted to it too, so we're two old codgers having a nice kip in the afternoon.
5pm
John loves shopping for children's toys, dangerous things like quad bikes and Segways. We have to make the grandchildren wear helmets, and they go bombing around the garden. We have 11 between us. John's youngest is nine months, the eldest is 16, nearly all boys. I'm very conscious I have an amazingly lucky, happy life. There's no reason to be unhappy.
6pm
I love teaching the kids to bake cakes, like I do on Prue Leith's Cotswold Kitchen (Saturdays, 11.45am, ITV1 and ITVX). Everything happens in real time on that show, we never refilm anything – if I make a cock-up it is just, 'Oh dear, never mind, let's stick it together with cream.' Paul [Hollywood] and I are about to go through the challenges for the next series of Bake Off as well. People keep asking if it will be my last – I suppose because I'm so old so it's a reasonable question. I ask it myself.
7pm
I cook everything we eat. John says he lives on leftovers, which is sort of true, because I can never throw anything away, but it wouldn't be a leftover if I didn't do some primary cooking. We'll have sausages and parsnip mash with skirlie, pinhead oatmeal fried with onions – so bad for you, full of butter – with sprout tops that look like tiny cabbages. God, they're delicious.
9pm
Sometimes we have to say to each other, 'We cannot go to bed yet, it's only nine o'clock.' But it's very tempting. The fatal thing is, we don't turn the damn light out until midnight. John reads antique magazines and I read The Great Game by Peter Hopkirk. I've been at it for two months now because it's so huge.