Mary Berry

by A. S. Dagnell

  The show hasn’t changed greatly in format over the years, although some elements have been modernised. Fashion, for example, has been thrown into the modern mix – and sometimes quite risqué fashion, at that! Kearney noted: ‘Jenni Murray chaired a heated debate on the thong, and I have been coached on how to walk on four-inch-high cerise marabou trimmed mules live on air.’

  At times, the show has caused controversy, not least during its early days when the word ‘vagina’ was used during a feature about women’s health. This caused outrage among some of the more sensitive members of the audience, and immediately the show’s producers decided euphemisms should be used for particular terms from then on. For decades afterwards the term ‘birth canal’ was preferred, so worried were radio bosses that another storm would erupt.

  The show’s staple, however, was always cookery. Throughout all the years it has aired, this has remained a constant. And once again, that’s where Mary came in. From 1994 to 2010, she was a regular contributor to the show. She was used predominantly for the phone-ins, but would later host segments on food as well as giving her own advice for succeeding in the kitchen. Just as the show became part of the listeners’ daily routine, so too did Mary’s appearances on it. Her words of wisdom became something that women could rely on, a friendly figure to whom they could turn on a regular basis, who could help them with even the most seemingly trivial problems they were encountering in the kitchen. No problem was too small or too big – Mary was always on hand to help. In particular, Mary’s annual Christmas cookery phone-in became the stuff of legend, as she helped stressed housewives and homemakers navigate the maze that was the kitchen during the festive season. Daily Telegraph columnist Alison Pearson wrote about how she would barely get through December without Mary’s help on Woman’s Hour. Writing in the paper, Pearson said: ‘Mary will rescue my Yule log, which is looking a lot like a dead baby crocodile, whip up a trifle and make me a cup of tea. Unflappable, boundlessly kind, fresh as a cupcake at 76, the cook has recruited a new army of fans with her appearance on the Great British Bake Off. Aga shall not wither her, nor custom stale her Pear Crostini. Mary was the star of the best Woman’s Hour I can remember in ages, just her in the studio with Jane Garvey, a Baby Belling and half a century of culinary wisdom. “Never stick anything up a goose’s bottom,” she cautioned. I wouldn’t dream of it.’

  Of course, the kitchen is a place that has seen great change over the years while Woman’s Hour has been on air. This was something the show’s producers often had to take into account. ‘People are always astonished when I say that only about 60 per cent of the population had a shiny new fridge in their kitchen,’ said Sue MacGregor. ‘But we did quite a lot of cooking recipes with people like Delia Smith and Mary Berry and I can remember that, during the week, I was never allowed to say to put something in the fridge because lots of women couldn’t afford a fridge in their homes back then. However, we had the Saturday omnibus edition for women who were out at work during the week, and we decided that we could mention fridges on that show because we thought that if they had been out at work all week they could probably afford to buy one.’ This was something Mary understood too, and she would often tailor her advice so that people who didn’t have the latest gadgets wouldn’t feel alienated.

  Following her success on Woman’s Hour, other radio work was offered to Mary. She was a regular on another Radio 4 phone-in called Tuesday Call. Then between 1995 and 1998 she was a regular contributer on The Debbie Thrower Programme on BBC Radio 1. As a guest on the first Monday of every month, Mary once again took calls on the phone-in, while on other occasions she presented topical food items.

  Mary’s work in broadcasting transformed her profile from a cookery writer into a media personality. It was a turn of events she had probably never dreamed of when she first started writing recipes for Housewife magazine on a freelance basis. Hers was a style that would, at times, seem incongruous, considering how the landscape of cooking TV developed over the years, with cookery shows being given the reality-show treatment. Suddenly it became popular to centre cookery shows around a strong-willed and opinionated chef, who was demanding and had incredibly high standards. Rarely were the efforts of mere civilians good enough for these hard taskmasters and, at times, it seemed as though serving up a Michelin-starred meal may not even satisfy. While programmes such as these found a solid fan base, surely Mary’s place as a TV celebrity would be in doubt as a result? In fact, quite the opposite turned out to be true. As suddenly, it seems, as they rose in popularity, this kind of rapid-fire, high-pressure show was superseded by something altogether more gentle. Stuart Heritage, writing in the Guardian about another competitive series, the Great British Menu, described this trend. He said: ‘Once upon a time, shipping a load of professional chefs into a TV studio together would have been a recipe for shouting and diva tantrums and endless tiresome piddling contests. The friendliness of the contestants has been the secret to the show’s success this year, and it’s been a genuine breath of fresh air.’ Heritage wondered whether host Marco Pierre White was adapting to the times, or mellowing as he approached middle age. ‘Sporadic MasterChef professional kitchen mishaps aside, it seems as if the rude TV chef is dead. So long as this doesn’t mean that Gordon Ramsay will return with a new show about how much he loves kittens and moonbeams, I’d say that was a good thing.’ The public’s appetite for the more volatile types of cookery show seemed to have waned.

  It appeared that cookery TV had come full circle. That sense of friendship and closeness Mary had first cultivated with her viewers and listeners in the 1960s and 1970s was valued once again. While Mary had never fallen out of fashion and remained perennially popular, it suddenly appeared an especially good thing that she had stuck to her guns and remained herself. For her part, Mary insists she would never have wanted to get involved in a show where shouting matches occurred.

  ‘The combative style of most TV competitions puts me right off,’ she told the Daily Mail. ‘I don’t see any reason to shout or swear or be hyped up. I want to encourage the contestants to bake, and people at home to think that they can make it too. It’s not just entertainment, it’s a giant cookery lesson.’ In later interviews she would expand on that theme when talking about the Great British Bake Off. Talking to the Radio Times, Mary said: ‘Once viewers have seen people attempt something like a Battenberg cake and get into trouble then I come along and slowly and carefully show them how to make the perfect Battenberg, stopping when it might go wrong and encouraging them to have a go at home. I don’t use ingredients that people aren’t going to use again. And I don’t make things complicated.’ Helping people to enjoy cooking and healthy food is of prime importance to Mary, she told Kirsty Young: ‘I really hope that people are taking note of all the cooking that is going on on telly. I think a lot of the cooking is a bit theatrical, but I think there are plenty of programmes that show you exactly what to do. And I hope it tempts people to cook at home.’ And it was to be the Great British Bake Off that would not only put those principles into practice, but would also make Mary a primetime TV star.

  CHAPTER 8

  LET THE BAKE OFF BEGIN!

  In 2010 Mary was on the brink of becoming a true primetime TV star – even if she didn’t yet know it. A new series called the Great British Bake Off was being developed and it was to be Mary who would be the face of it. That summer, an independent British TV company called Love Productions was looking for its next big hit. The production company, which was founded in 2005, had quickly developed a reputation as one of the premier companies of its kind in Britain. It’s fair to say that it had a very specific niche, having become known for its gritty reality TV documentaries. These included Underage and Having Sex, which was centred around the statistic that one in three British youngsters will have sex before their sixteenth birthday, and 8 Boys And Wanting A Girl, which visited the home of 43-year-old Wendy Bowen who, as the title of the show suggested, had given birth to eight sons but was desperate
to conceive a daughter … resulting in her ‘biological clock ticking into an obsession’. TV during the 2000s has often been criticised for not being sufficiently imaginative and for appealing to the lowest common denominator – favouring scandal and formulaic programming over inspiring, well-crafted shows. But Love Productions didn’t shy away from ‘issues’ and so was proving very successful in this climate; it had continued to bag sizeable ratings despite the fragmentation of audiences across multiple channels since the introduction of Freeview in the early 2000s. But by the late 2000s some of their tried-and-tested formats at last seemed to be faltering, and now Love Productions was looking for something different.

  Cookery shows at the beginning of the millennium were as popular as they had always been – in fact, if anything, they were becoming more popular. It was time for Love Productions to move into this lucrative market. They wanted a competitive cookery show, but with a twist. At this time baking was back in fashion in Britain, thanks to a love for all things retro, and soon the biting recession would further encourage people to stay at home and have fun for free – or at least, very little outlay. Combining two elements – competitive cookery and baking – seemed like the perfect mix for a new TV show. And so the Great British Bake Off was born. The title was similar to the Great British Menu, another cookery competition which saw top British chefs compete for the chance to cook one course of a four-course banquet for the great and the good, including the Queen and the British Ambassador to France. When announcing the show in mid-2010, Love’s managing director Richard McKerrow promised a ‘warm and celebratory’ series that would ‘tell the history of Britain through baking’. He added: ‘Baking is quintessentially British and it’s the perfect feelgood subject for these rather straitened times. We want nothing less than to get the whole country baking again.’

  And it didn’t take long for the show to be commissioned by a major TV channel: BBC2 snapped it up. It was no surprise that this channel went for the Great British Bake Off, as it had long been the port of call for major cookery competition shows. It had been the birthplace of MasterChef, which had recently been relaunched, as well as the Great British Menu, and a host of other cookery shows from the likes of Nigella Lawson, Jamie Oliver and Delia Smith, as well as Mary herself.

  Now that the TV show had a home, the producers had to go about finding their stars.

  The other judge was to be Paul Hollywood. In some respects he and Mary couldn’t be more different. But in other ways their lives – and their routes to the top of their profession – mirror each other in a rather uncanny way.

  Born in 1966 in Wallasey, Merseyside, baking seemed to be in Paul’s blood. His great-great-grandfather had been head baker at the Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool, while dad John owned a chain of bakeries, and one of his brothers has a successful wholesale baking business. As a child Paul was brought up above one of his father’s bakeries. His first memory was making gingerbread biscuits with his mum, who was a graphic designer, and his dad at the age of five. Similar to Mary, Paul’s teenage years were characterised by a relaxed attitude to academic work – not atypical for a lot of young people at that time. ‘Dad was always in bed in the afternoons because of getting up in the early hours to bake,’ Paul told the Daily Mail. ‘It’s one of the reasons I didn’t want to be a baker initially. I was a bed person; I think most teenagers are. But eventually you realise that getting up at dawn on a summer’s morning is the best time. The roads are quiet, you can think, and you work while everyone else is sleeping.’

  But back then, when it came to choosing what he wanted to do with his life, it seemed baking wasn’t on the menu. So instead Paul decided to take a more artistic route and plumped for a course in sculpture at Wallasey School of Art. Paul, who had grown his hair to his shoulders, seemed to be following quite a hippyish path, as was fashionable among youngsters back then. Another similarity between him and Mary was that neither particularly enjoyed their studies, and instead of completing his course in sculpture, Paul quit to pursue a career in the food industry. He says his dad made him an offer he struggled to turn down. ‘He said if I jacked it in and worked for him instead he’d give me £500, but only as long as I cut my hair,’ Paul told the Daily Mail. ‘That was a lot of cash in the mid-eighties. My mates would go clubbing and stop by the bakery in the early hours for something to eat. It upset me a bit to miss out on partying, but baking was what I wanted to do.’

  Slowly, Paul started to work his way up the baking hierarchy, just as Mary had done from her early journalistic contributions right up to becoming an established author and broadcaster. At first he worked at one of his father’s bakeries in Lincoln in the east of England. John Hollywood had a country-wide chain, and before long Paul was managing a handful of outlets. He later went on to be in charge of others back home on Merseyside. By now he had firmly established a love of baking – it was not only a hobby, but his profession, and one that he was excelling at.

  Bigger things were on the horizon, though. After working his way from the bottom up, Paul was soon noticed by established names in the hospitality world, and he had five-star hotels rushing to sign him up to work in their kitchens. It seemed that, after having taken a more relaxed approach to work during his teenage years, Paul had found his drive and ambition. Jobs as head baker at a number of prestigious hotels, including The Dorchester, the Chester Grosvenor and Spa and The Cliveden, followed. ‘I was passionate and very competitive,’ Paul told the Daily Mail. ‘I wanted to become the best. Mix passion with a competitive streak and ambition and you’ve got a recipe to do whatever you want. Anyone who’s successful will have one or all three of those traits.’

  Soon hotels abroad heard about Paul’s reputation as a master baker, and they came after him. Much like Mary, Paul was about to get used to being headhunted. His hard work had paid off and now his reputation preceded him. By now Paul was in his late twenties, and he was offered the chance to move to Cyprus. There was a job going at the plush Anassa hotel, and Paul brought his very British brand of baking to the Cypriot community as well as holidaymakers from around the world. High teas, scones and clotted cream were all on his menu. ‘I flew out for an interview thinking it would just be a jolly for two days but came back really wanting to work there, which was so different to my normal character,’ Paul told the Daily Mail. ‘I’d always been such a home bird. When I moved to Cyprus, Mum gave it three weeks – I stayed for six years.’ Not only was his time in Cyprus a professional triumph, but it changed the course of his personal life, too. While working at the Anassa, Paul met fellow Brit Alexandra, who was working at the resort as a PADI diving instructor. Keen to soak up everything the island had to offer, Paul enlisted in classes and he and Alexandra fell in love, marrying a year later. They later had a son, Josh, before moving back to Britain and setting up home in the quiet Kent countryside.

  As life in Cyprus was ticking along nicely, though, Paul happily stumbled across the chance to become a TV star. As if by fate, a camera crew arrived at the hotel where he worked to film a programme with respected food critic, Thane Prince. The producers needed someone from the hotel’s kitchen to do a piece to camera. And that’s where Paul came in. ‘The crew asked me to do something to camera – I’d never done anything like that before,’ Paul told the Daily Mail. ‘The director said I should work in TV. I thought, “Yeah, right!” But when I came back to the UK two years later in 1999 I called him and within two months filmed a series with James Martin called Use Your Loaf.’ James has remained a close friend and is godfather to Paul’s son.

  More TV work followed his big break and, like Mary, Paul became a regular on the daytime television circuit. Appearances on The Generation Game, The Heaven and Earth Show, ITV1’s phenomenally successful This Morning, Ready Steady Cook and The Alan Titchmarsh Show all followed, as well as shows such as Good Food Live on the Good Food channel, while he has also been in demand as a guest speaker at several food festivals, including the Cumbrian Food Festival, and the BBC Good Food S
how and the Cake and Bake Show, both in London. He has also become a published author, writing two books. 100 Great Breads was released in 2004 and won him the Gourmand World Cookbook Award for Top Bread and Pastry Book in 2005 – the cookbook world’s equivalent of taking home an Oscar. And following the success of the first two series of GBBO, Paul released How to Bake in 2012.

  But while the TV and media work made Paul a household name, he never forgot his roots in baking. He has since set up his own artisan bread-baking company, which he manages to this day. It supplies delis and restaurants around London and the South East. One of his products attracted many column inches in 2008, after he created an almond and Roquefort sourdough recipe. If it sounds expensive, that’s because it is. At the time, newspapers said it was the most expensive bread to be made in Britain, with Paul describing it in interviews as the ‘Rolls-Royce of loaves’. The plush London department store Harrods sold it for an eye-watering £15 a loaf. Explaining the hefty price tag, Paul said that the Roquefort came from a specialist cheese supplier in France and cost £15 a kilo. The flour for the bread, meanwhile, was handmade by a specialist miller in Wiltshire.

  If there was anyone who would know a thing or two about baking, it seemed it would be Paul. And so when the GBBO producers came to deciding who would be the perfect fit for the role of the tough-talking judge, Paul came to mind. Sue Perkins, who was later picked to co-present the show, was already in talks with the producers. She knew Paul after having been involved in a string of food programmes, and they had met on a number of occasions. She suggested him as a good choice to sit alongside Mary. To the producers, he seemed like the perfect down-to-earth character. He had said in one interview with the Daily Mail: ‘All I want to do is bake. Whether I do that on TV or on the moon, I’m still just a baker.’ Paul’s straight-talking manner would balance out Mary’s poise and perfect manners. Paul explained in an interview how it all came about. ‘I was approached by Sue Perkins to take part, as she had seen some of my stuff on the Good Food channel,’ Paul told his local newspaper, the Kent Messenger. ‘The BBC then rang me to talk me through the idea and introduce me to fellow judge, baking writer Mary Berry. Then, at the start of April, we began filming around the country for the six-part series.’