Castaway guests share the soundtrack of their lives.
Prue Leith is a chef, restaurateur, writer, broadcaster and since 2017 a judge on The Great British Bake Off, reaching a weekly audience of many millions with her verdicts on all kinds of cakes, breads and biscuits. She was 77 when she took on the role, the latest chapter in a long food-centred career, which has taken her from a novice caterer washing lettuces in the bath of her small flat to a wide range of businesses, including a Michelin-starred restaurant and an academy for chefs.
“Apartheid was part of life. I knew that my parents were very liberal and my mother used to campaign against apartheid. She belonged to an organisation called the Black Sash, which was a women's organisation. I remember her standing on the town hall steps and having eggs thrown at her because she was protesting about the fact that you couldn't have black actors in a play. Even Othello had to be played by a white man, and so I always thought that we were very liberal.
“Madame took me, and the two little children off before breakfast, to get the bread. You know how the French go off and get bread early in the morning and we went to one shop for the bread, one shop for the croissants and another shop for the cake, the gateau Basque,” explains Prue. “Food was just taken seriously, and it was like the scales falling from my eyes: ‘What am I doing? Thinking I can be an actress or an artist or academic or… What I need to be is a cook.’”Prue moved to London in her early 20s, studied on a Cordon Bleu cookery course and started her own high-end catering business – from her flat.
“I’d cart them all down four flights and deliver them in my little Isetta three-wheeler bubble car or I would deliver stuff on the tube,” explains Prue, which is how she once left a basket of lobsters on the Piccadilly line.“I was really happy,” says Prue looking back at that time, “because I was in love with him. Nobody knew about our affair and so I was still great friends with all of his family and indeed his wife, who I adored.
“But what we didn't tell her,” continues Prue, “was that we had been in love for 13 years. We didn't tell her that he had been cheating on her all that time. I am not at all proud of the fact that I was an adulteress for all that time. But in a sense I just didn't think I had any option. I could not have left him ever.”"I had heard of it,” explains Prue.
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