by Sue Perkins
There wasn’t an awful lot of spare cash knocking about when we were little, so we often ate soya rather than beef mince, which was freeze-dried and packed into clear plastic bags. It was the colour of sadness and the texture of granola, but could be heated and cajoled back to half-life with tomatoes and stock. It was cheap – though I wouldn’t go as far as to say cheerful. I ate so much of the stuff that I’m pretty confident I’m one of the most genetically modified presenters working in television today.
I haven’t always been a big eater. I was underweight and sickly at birth, and remained that way until my late thirties when I discovered the Healing Power of Sponge. My indifference to food extended back to primary school during the reign of Sister Mary Dorothy and her right-handed harpies. When I was seven, I developed a full-blown eating disorder. Most food related problems stem from a deep-rooted psychological issue, although mine came courtesy of an unlikely source – Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. Remember Buck Rogers? Gil Gerard, as the eponymous hero – all teak bloat and enthusiasm, with Jack Palance as a scene-chewing space wacko heading up a nomad cult on Planet Vistula. (Vistula? You can get a cream for that. You’re welcome.)
I loved Buck Rogers. I believed every word of it. But Buck lied.
Yes, Buck, you did indeed predict the rise of the onesie and the playsuit. And, by God, you looked dapper in both. But no, Buck, the world did not end in a nuclear catastrophe at the close of the 20th century leading to the founding of the Earth Defense Directorate. The worst thing that happened was that a few people got frightened about the millennium bug, stockpiled tins of beans and thought their computers might crash. Oh, and the Wall of Fire which was supposed to light the Thames on New Year’s Eve 1999 was pretty shit. A Wall of Shit as it happens.
OK. So one particular episode of Buck Rogers – ‘Planet of the Slave Girls’ if you must know – featured a storyline in which the earth’s fighter squadron became totally incapacitated after eating poisoned food. This led me to the totally natural conclusion that even though I a.) wasn’t in an intergalactic fighter squadron, or b.) didn’t routinely eat weird discs covered in toxins, I too was being poisoned.
Other things that Buck Rogers made me frightened of:
gay robots
acid-coated boomerangs
Roddy McDowell
So convinced was I that my food was contaminated, I started to hide cheese sandwiches, spat things into napkins, feigned illness – anything to stop solids entering my digestive tract at the meal table. I was skinny as it was, and after a week of self-imposed starvation it became clear my parents were going to have to stage an intervention. One day, as I sat down for my tea, lips pursed, I noticed my mum and dad staring at each other in an unusually intense manner. She kept nodding at him, as if to say, Go on, Bert. Get on with it!
So Bert/Dad got on with it. He leaped from his chair, held my nose and, as my mouth obligingly fell open, rammed the Captain’s finest down my gullet. Yep, my dad force-fed me fish fingers, which incidentally is the most alliterative way you can be force-fed. Afterwards my mum said they both cried. ‘It was an act of violence,’ she said. I didn’t say anything because I was still coughing up neon-orange grit and the odd gobbet of cod.
In retrospect, I’m just glad she’s never asked me if I think that particular early trauma is one of the things that has made me gay. My mum is deeply cool about me being lady-homo but will sporadically try to link childhood events (where she perceives herself to be lacking in some way) to my sexuality in an attempt to rationalize it.
Mum:
When I forgot to bring your jacket with me and you nearly froze to death in Sainsbury’s car park that time, do you think that had anything to do with your sexuality?
Me:
No, Mum.
Mum:
When we refused to allow you to go on the school day-trip to Calais and you had to sit with Karen Rosenberg all day – who couldn’t go because she was an observant Jew – did that make you gay?
Me:
No, Mum.
Anyhow, after Fishfingergate, I ate with gusto. I am in no way condoning or celebrating force-feeding. I’m just saying that it worked for me. And it may or may not have made me gay.
Mum, I’m kidding. Look. See? I was fine. I even did a project about it.
Sadly, I only got a C grade from my teacher, as there weren’t any images of fish fingers in it.
As I hit double digits, Mum started entertaining in earnest. We three kids would sit on the stairs in height order, like myopic von Trapps, and peek through the wood-effect balustrade at the adults below. There would be the comforting peaty reek of Scotch and the rumble of banter, in the days before ‘banter’ was a euphemism for ‘white male doing rape jokes’. These early dinner parties soon evolved into more lavish events – often themed and costumed – culminating in a series of vicars-and-tarts parties. These were all the rage back then, back when there was some form of moral divide between the two camps.
I am still in therapy over the sight of my dad dressed as a ‘tart’. He looked like an east-European shot-putter wearing the pelt of Farah Fawcett. Occasionally he would ram a hand down his nylon blouse and adjust one of his balloon breasts, which would sag and pucker over the course of the evening until, around 2 a.m., he would put them out of their misery with the prick of a pin.
Finally, Mum was able to put the mass-catering skills she’d been honing for a decade into practice. Not only that, but she started experimenting with serving suggestions, presenting things in Kilner jars or atop scrubbed scallop shells she got from the fishmonger. She never served the actual scallops, of course – they would have ended up in the bin. Why? Because
‘They’re foreign muck.’
Dad’s answer to anything that wasn’t ice cream, sausages or chips was
‘Not for me. It’s foreign muck.’
Dad’s gastronomic conservatism didn’t stop Mum though – she loved to push herself. The most exciting thing that ever happened was one of us bringing home a vegetarian. These were the days where vegetarian meals were just side dishes or listed on menus under ‘Accompaniments’.
Mum:
Are you saying we never gave you enough vegetables? Do you think that might have made you gay?
Me:
No, Mum.
Once I’d left home and the 90s established themselves, the dinner parties faded out. I imagine it was because the kids had grown up and now the parents had to do the same. Either that or my dad’s unconvincing and unrelenting transvestism had created a rift between him and his mates. After that, Mum and Dad opted for smaller affairs with only the closest of friends, the sort of friends comfortable with
a. Dad pretending he had an enormous pair of breasts.
b. Mum mainly serving food in seashells.
I remember that my dad’s mate Mick would come round a lot. I loved him and his missus. He’d known Dad since they were kids, when they’d ripped around south-east London creating mayhem together. Mick would arrive and then the drinking would begin. And by God, could they drink – bottle after bottle after endless bottle. Sometime around 3 a.m. Mick would fall into the hedge in the front garden on the way to his car. He always drove. Right up to the time they banned him for life.
At the sound of grown man collapsing into hedgerow, we’d wake up.
Me:
What’s happened, Mum?
Mum:
Your Uncle Mick has just had one of his dizzy sp
ells. Now go back to bed.
I loved those two. Loved them for reasons I am only now starting to fully understand. I believe that Mick was the only person keeping the black dog of depression away from my dad after the cancer pecked at him, until even he retreated for a while and let it consume Dad at will.
TAKING THE ÉPOISSES
One such evening Eve, Mick’s wife, brought round a large cheese. At the end of the meal the women duly unwrapped its cling-film shroud and, hey presto, the whole room smelt like instant arse.
Dad:
Christ! What’s that? It’s awful.
Mick:
It’s making my nose bleed.
Mum:
[burying her nostrils in her sleeve] I’ll open a window.
There was no way we could eat it – for starters, it was impossible to get it within arm’s length of your face without retching. Any proximity set the whole of your GI tract into spasm. But it couldn’t stay in the room. It was a health hazard just sitting there, sweating. And so it got moved to the fridge. Out of sight, out of mind, but very much still in nasal passages.
Then, at the end of the evening came the fight about who should take it home.
Mick:
I’m not having it in the fecking car.
Eve:
I’m not having it in the fecking house!
Mick:
And it was a present. A present. You can’t return it. You can’t look a gift cheese in the mouth, Bert.
So we were stuck with it. Stuck with the cheese of doom. God only knows what cheese it was, but after years of making food television my money’s on an Époisses. The house was humming for weeks – imagine a boiler room densely packed with wet golden retrievers and you’re not even close. The French might not have won a major war for over a hundred years but, I’m telling you, they have been stealth-attacking British households for decades with devastating efficiency.
Every time we opened the fridge, this gust swept over you, like a flatulent bison with giardia. It made my eyes water and my hair rise at the roots. My entire body would stiffen, every atom sending messages to my brain – This smell? This smell ain’t right …
Of course you’re thinking, Why didn’t they just bin it? Well, they could have were it not for the fact that
a. My parents would never ever countenance wasting food.
b. My parents don’t like to opt for an easy solution when a complex deadlock is possible.
So there we were, trapped between the Franco-stein horrors of 1990s artisanal cheese production and the moral rigour of 1950s austerity. Something had to give.
Thankfully we didn’t have to keep it for long. Mum and Dad soon devised a cunning plan by which they could smuggle the cheese back to Mick and Eve’s. The next time they went round for dinner they took the cheese with them. Bold as brass.
Mick:
Oh Jesus, the smell – it’s even worse than I remembered.
Eve:
[shrieking] Get it out of here!
Dad:
It’s a present. A present. You can’t return it.
And so it sat in their fridge for six weeks.
Next dinner, and it was clear the Flynns were going to have to up their game. They brought the cheese to our house, but instead of openly offering it, they hid it behind the curtains. One–nil. Mum and Dad tracked it down (not hard, for reasons made manifestly clear above) and then returned it and hid it under a floorboard. One–all.
That was in 1991.
It is now 2015, and what you need to know is that the game is still going on. Same cheese – different hiding places. So far the cheese has been in flowerpots and hedgerows and under beds and in cupboards. Hell, in one particularly successful gambit, my super-square mum excused herself from dinner, went to the bathroom, pulled out a screwdriver from her purse, unscrewed the bath panel and sneaked the cheese in there. Take THAT, Catwoman.
That particular placement took them six months to find. I distinctly remember the call from Mick several weeks after the dinner.
Mick:
Susan, is your mum there?
Me:
No, she’s out.
Mick:
OK. Right. OK. Can you take a message?
Me:
Sure.
Mick:
Can you … I need you to … Oh God. Just ask her – have we got the cheese?
Finally they found it, and the game was on again. It travelled back to us in disguise, and last I heard it had gone back to them rammed into the bottom of a bottle of expensive Scotch. Ooops. I’ve given it away now. First rule of Cheese Swap, you don’t talk about Cheese Swap.
As a family we often talk about the cheese, and at the merest mention of its name that smell rises again in our nostrils.
Me:
I’ve never, never to this day smelt anything like it.
Mum:
Mmm. Me neither. [Pause] Do you think it might have made you gay?
Me:
Possibly, Mum. It’s possible.
In the spring of 2009 the then controller of BBC2, Janice Hadlow, asked if I’d think about presenting a cake show. By this time I had become the go-to girl for extreme eating for the minimum wage.
I said, ‘That sounds like an awful idea. No one is going to watch it, and I can’t imagine anything more tedious. It would be like watching paint dry, except worse, because after paint’s dry you can at least hang pictures on it and sit back and admire it, whereas with a cake you just eat it and then feel awful about yourself.’
I said no.
But Janice is nothing if not a persistent soul, and when Janice thinks something is a good idea you listen, seeing as she is pretty much the cleverest person in the whole world. In pitching meetings you’d listen in awe as she riffed on Byzantine art and string theory and why the Hanoverians had such dysfunctional families, and then you’d feel bad for pitching her The House of Hairy Children* or some such piffle.
Still, I said no.
By this point Janice was probably pretty pissed off, but stuck with it using the most effective weapon at her disposal – making me unemployed. Yep, she rather cleverly made sure I had no other work to distract me. Eventually the thought of dicking about with my best mate overcame my reservations about dragging myself and the nation towards morbid obesity and Type 2 diabetes.
From the outset Mary Berry was a dead cert for judge. I’d already had the pleasure of working with her in the 1950s – when she came on Supersizers and cooked a horsemeat steak in Stork. Trust me, that’s the sort of first meeting you never forget. The male judge, however (as he is now affectionately known), was less set in stone. The first-round casting process failed to turn up a suitable candidate, but then we remembered this bloke on a cable show several years before, all mahogany and burly, pummelling the living shit out of a wannabe cob.
‘Yes! He’s great – what was his name?’
‘Screw his name,’ I replied. ‘Let’s talk about his hair.’
Paul Hollywood’s barnet is made up of a series of grey vertiginous spikes, which serve not only to repel invaders but also to test the texture of sponges. It’s a technique he mastered while working at the Dorchester. Just one simple bend of the waist and he ca
n skewer the cake on his locks. If there is any residue left on his hair, then the cake is underdone. If the hair comes out clean, it’s ready to remove from the oven.
So there we were, the four of us – Mary, Paul, myself and Mel – the most ridiculous and over-scrutinized family since the Kardashians. For those who have never seen The Great British Bake Off, the show in question, allow me to elaborate. Here’s how it works.
I arrive around 8 a.m., impeccably dressed and elegantly coiffured. I then remove these perfect clothes and change into a jam-smeared jacket, ill-fitting low-crotch trousers and muddy brogues while tousling my hair into a wonky cockerel spike – all in an effort to get to the role of ‘Sue Perkins’. I have opted to play ‘Sue Perkins’ as a care-worn scruffy little sugar hog who speaks only in double entendres (see baps, plums, tarts, etc.).
At around 8.30 a.m. my life partner Melanie and I walk into a large tent stationed somewhere in England’s green and pleasant land and invite the contestants within to make a perfectly simple, everyday creation. It could be a life-sized statue of Michael Gove in vanilla sponge or a tier of profiteroles that expresses their feelings about nationalism. Simple, everyday stuff. To begin proceedings, I shout the word BAAAAAKE in a strangled and slightly sarcastic manner.