Dame Prue Leith

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BBC Sounds, Music, Radio Podcasts. Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne, and this is the Desert Island Discs Podcast. Every week, I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book, and luxury they'd want to take with them if they were cast away to a desert island. And, for rights reasons, the music is shorter than the original broadcast. I hope you enjoy listening.

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My castaway this week is the chef, restaurateur, writer and broadcaster Dame Prue Leith. She'd already forged a formidable reputation in culinary circles and was contemplating a quieter life when, in 2017, everything changed. She was invited to become a judge on the Great British Bake Off. She was 77, an age when women don't get offered a slot on prime-time television, let alone a show which regularly attracts many millions of viewers. She quickly won a new generation of fans with her vibrant eyewear, pithy observations and on-screen chemistry with fellow judge Paul Hollywood. She fell in love with food as a young woman, not in her native South Africa, but in Paris in the early 60s. She moved to London to study at the Cordonblaux Cookery School and set up a catering business from her bed sit. It was a success despite the occasional disaster, like the time she left a soiree's worth of live lobsters on the Piccadilly line.

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She opened her first restaurant in 1969, which she followed with a cookery school. Her broadcasting career started with a two-minute slot on the Today programme here on Radio 4, serving up cooking tips to the nation. By the early 90s, her empire was turning over £15 million a year. She says, The thing about food is that you don't lose interest in it, because twice a day you get hungry and you think about food again. I don't think I'd feel the same about motor cars. Prue Leith, welcome to Desert Island Discs. Well, thank you for having me. Prue, we're speaking at Christmas, which is of course a greedy time of year, and you often say that being greedy has been the key to your success. What are you greedy for, I wonder?

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Well, you know, the funny thing is, I think I am pretty greedy for just about anything and everything. And that's really been the sort of motivation for me doing so many different things all my life. You just want to try them. I just can't resist. Everybody says, Would you like to do that? I think, oh, yeah, that'd be interesting. I'd love to do that.

Dame Prue Leith2:34

It's one of the

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And I'm greedy. You know, I find it really difficult not to eat the whole cake I'll make off.

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I'm very glad to hear that. That's satisfying to know.

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You began a high profile job in your late seventies, Prue. Do you ever feel like you're demolishing a few stereotypes alongside all that cake? I've never thought of myself as a kind of role model or champion of women doing stuff, but it's never occurred to me that they wouldn't.

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People often say to me, How can you wear amazingly big necklaces or bright colors or funny glasses? I mean, that's okay when you're twenty, but it's not okay when you're eighty one.

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And my thing is that I think bright colours make you cheerful.

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You know, if if you put on a yellow coat i in on a rainy day, you feel better. And it distresses me that if you see people getting off a train in winter, every one of them's in a black coat. And it's amazing if you see one red coat

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It'd be terrific, but you pray you don't.

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And we're sending you off to the island today. I wonder if you, before we start talking about your desert island discs, have a desert island bake?

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Well, I think it would be a bread of some kind, wouldn't it? I mean, you couldn't eat cake every day.

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A sort of focatcha, you know, some sort of really squashy, comforting, delicious bread. Oh, that sounds rather lovely. And the music to go with it, let's get stuck into your first selection, too, if you wouldn't mind, Prue. What have you chosen?

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Well, this is a perhaps a little bit obvious because, you know, my youth was the sixties. So it's Lucy in the sky with diamonds, which of course is the Beatles. I still love it. I still absolutely love it.

Dame Prue Leith4:27

Uh

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Uh

Speaker 24:28

Lucy in the sky with diamonds Lucy in the sky with diamonds

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The sea in the sky with viral

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Uh

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Follow her down to a bridge by a fountain where rocking horse people eat marshmallow pies.

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Lucy in the sky with diamonds, the Beatles. Pruli, the hospitality industry is of course facing very challenging times at the moment. Pubs and restaurants are also struggling to hire skilled staff from the EU after Brexit. Do you think that working in hospitality doesn't have the status it deserves and that makes it harder to recruit new people? You know, this is something that I have been banging on about for all my life. Caterers are so undervalued. Top chefs get paid well and top restaurateurs can earn a lot of money. But the pay, by and large, is poor. The hours are lousy. You know, the long, the short of it is we don't pay enough for food. We don't pay enough for raw food and we don't pay enough for restaurant food. And what I'm hoping is that now...

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Because there's been so much attention to it, we will start to pay people better. But I'm sorry to say that'll mean you pay more for your dinner.

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You voted for Brexit in the last referendum. I wondered if you'd regretted that at any point over the difficult times of the past eighteen months, two years. Yes, I've certainly I haven't actually regretted it because I still think long term it's it's a good thing. But I

Dame Prue Leith6:00

Over the the

Dame Prue Leith6:04

Yes, I

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I voted because I thought that we ought to be making our own decisions. And what I've the only things I've been disappointed by, and they are disappointing, is obviously I think we were not quick enough to realize just how difficult it would be to get staff.

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I think we should let people in if we need them in the trade. And then the other thing I'm still anxious about is that I think we have very good food standards in this country. And I've always thought that we shouldn't be allowed to make a deal that breaches our own rules. Prue, I know that your pro-Brexit stance led to you being the target of online trolling. Did that upset you?

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Yes, very much. It's horrible. Being trolled is absolutely

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Awful because you're so powerless. I mean, everybody says this, but it's true. You cannot come back and argue your case. But I was advised, and I think correctly, to do nothing. Don't give it oxygen. All you'll do is reignite the people who hate you. And so I did nothing, and it went away. And it didn't last very long, and it didn't upset me for very long.

Dame Prue Leith7:19

Bulletin.

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Alright then Prudes, time for some more music. Disc number two now. What have you got for us and why have you chosen it to do?

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Well, it's a very funny one, and it's called The Ugly Duckling.

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And the reason I chose it was because one of my memories of being a teenager, being so embarrassed, because my mother would put this, she was an actress, and when this song came on, she would dance around the room, being the ugly duckling and wiggling her tail. And you know how embarrassing it is when your parents, well, dad dancing, mum dancing is worse.

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There once was an ugly duckling, With feathers all stubby and brown.

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And the

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Other birds in song

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Many words in

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Get out of town.

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Get out there.

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Get out.

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Get out of town.

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And he went with a quack and a waddle and a quack in a flurry of iderdown.

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It's so sweet, isn't it? A nationwide wiggling outbreak has just happened, Prue. I'm sure. I just absolutely love it.

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Yeah.

Dame Prue Leith8:37

Yeah.

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THE UGLY DUCKLING BY DANNI KAY. Prue Leith, you were born in Cape Town, South Africa, in nineteen forty. You grew up in Johannesburg, the middle of three children, and your father Stuart worked for a subsidiary of ICI, and your mother, Peggy, was an actress. Did having a famous mum make you the envy of all your friends?

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Uh no, you know, funnily enough, I was really embarrassed about having a famous mother. I used to long to have a very

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Cuddly, plump mum who made cakes and came to the school fate. And then one day the head teacher said to me, Oh, your mum's coming to talk to the school about Shakespeare. And I thought, Oh, God, I'll die, I'll die. And I hid at the back of the hall. And my mamma came onto the stage and she said, Right, I'm going to tell you some Shakespeare stories. And she told us briefly about the first one she told us about was Romeo and Juliet.

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And then she took at one of the speeches and she was at at the time forty two, forty five or something. She immediately became a fourteen year old girl in love.

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She just was transformed and I walked out of that school hall so proud of myself. I thought I was the Beasneys because my mother is an actress and she's far too busy to make cakes and come to school fates. So I just hadn't appreciated her as the long, the short of it.

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And how did you get on with your father?

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He was very clever. I mean, I think it's one of the things I tried to do a little bit with my children too, is, you know, your children, if they have siblings, what they love is to be with one of their parents or both their parents by themselves without their siblings. So my dad would sometimes take me out just for supper by myself. Sounds so funny now, but there was a restaurant called The Chicken in the Basket and it was basically a grilled chicken that you pulled to bits with your fingers and had chips. And I love the fact that it was served in a basket. I think I was always in love with the trappings of restaurants.

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What do you remember about growing up in South Africa? You've described yours as a happy childhood, but also a very privileged one. Well, it was. I mean, we were quite well off, and I went to a private school. And the thing that made us most privileged of all is we were white middle class. And so, you know, apartheid was part of life. I knew that my parents were very liberal. My mother used to campaign against apartheid. She belonged to an organisation called the Black Sash, which was a women's organisation that

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I remember her standing on the town hall steps and having eggs thrown at her because she was protesting about the fact that um 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.

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But the truth is, it wasn't until I got to Europe that I realized how ingrained racism is. I mean, for example,

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I would walk down the street, as a young fourteen year old say, with my girlfriends giggling away. A venerable old black man would perhaps get off the pavement and walk in the gutter to let these giggling schoolgirls pass.

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Because the whole culture was blacks had to make w way for whites. My nanny, who was black, was not allowed to sit in the bus with us in the front of the bus. She had to sit at the back of the bus. And I d I still have a sense of guilt. I think all South Africans do.

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It's time for your third piece of music, Prue. What have you chosen? Well, you'd not be surprised to hear that I've chosen Cozy Sicali Africa.

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which has now become the South African national anthem, and it's sung by the Lady Smith Black Mambazo choir.

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Oh sing, sing and let us be

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Oh si si le si el chema.

Dame Prue Leith13:02

Lucifer White.

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Uh

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Oh, it's so lovely, isn't it? Wonderful. Cozy Sigalele Afrika, Ladysmith Black Mambazo. Pruleith, I absolutely love this quote from you. My family didn't talk about food, money, sex or politics. God knows what they did talk about, because those are all the interesting things.

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Yeah, I know. Why wasn't food a a topic of conversation at home? Well, I think it was a generational thing. It was considered rather vulgar to talk about food. You know, it's something you put in your body and it's, yeah, too physical. All a bit too physical. Okay.

Dame Prue Leith13:41

Okay.

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And um I didn't so I didn't cook at all. I mean I cooked I once made a cake at school, a Christmas cake, but I didn't put any glycerine into the royal icing. So it's set like concrete.

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My father tried to cut it, and he couldn't get in.

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So he got hold of my mother's ivory handled carving knife really beautiful knife and used it like a chisel, held it above the cake and hit it with a hammer.

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And it broke the knife, and it still didn't get through the

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Through the icing. So in the end, we turned the whole cake over and scooped the cake out of the bottom. So let's talk about how your own love affair with food started. After a bit of shopping and changing, when you were 20, you persuaded your father to let you go to the Sorbonne to study French, and you were working as an au pair in the holidays. Paris was the culinary eye-opener for you, wasn't it? What food discoveries did you make there? I think what I discovered most.

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What was most important was the fact that

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food was important. You know, the French talk about food all the time. Everybody talks about food. And the other thing is that when I was au paire,

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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?

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And we went to one shop for the baguettes, one shop for the croissant and another shop for the cake, the Gateau Basque. And I said, after a couple of mornings of this, I said, Well, why do we do that? All the shops sell all of those things. And she looked at me as if I was completely mad. She said, Well, because the croissants are the best in that shop and you know and it hadn't occurred to me that people took that much trouble over shopping. I mean, my mother used to just order it all on the telephone.

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Food was just taken seriously, and I often say it was like the scales falling from my eyes. What am I doing thinking I can be an actress or an artist or an academic or s what I need to be as a cook?

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Prue, it's time for some more music. Your fourth choice to day. What is it, and why are you taking it with you to the island?

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We never listened to music, and I never went to concerts as a child. It's odd, because my mother was such a cultured woman, and she sang rather well, but I can't sing a note, and I knew nothing about music. And when I got to Paris, for some reason I can't now remember why

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I went to a concert and they played Mozart's Eine Kleinen Nachmusik and

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That was my beginning of my interest in classical music.

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Yeah.

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Mozart's Eine Kleiner Nachtmusik, performed by the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, conducted by Sir Neville Mariner. Pruleith, in 1962, you moved to London and went on a Cordon Blaux cookery course, then started a catering business from the bedsit where you were living. How did that go down with your landlady? Well, fortunately, she had no sense of smell. So she never came up to the fourth floor, which is where I was. I would have, on the landing where the bathroom was, I would very often have I'd wash the lettuces in the bath and I'd keep the lobsters there because they couldn't climb out, you know.

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And then when I had done a tray of beautiful

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fitifour or little sandwiches or canopes for a cocktail party. I'd line them all up on the top of my bed.

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And then I'd cart it all downstairs in the four flights and deliver it in my little I had a little Iseta three-wheeler bubble car.

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Or I would deliver stuff on the tube. That was how you came to leave the lobsters on the Piccadilly line. I did, yes. Did you fall asleep? Did you forget they were there? No, I just picked up the other bar you know, I was had a lot of bags and I just left one basket behind. Must have got all the way to Cockfoster's.

Dame Prue Leith18:27

And there I

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Might have been a bit of a surprise for somebody.

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So by this time, Prue, you'd fallen in love with the writer Rain Krueger. He was eighteen years older than you and a family friend, and you'd known him since childhood. Your mother and his wife, Nan, were very close. Now you had an affair with Rain that lasted thirteen years. How do you look back on that time now?

Dame Prue Leith18:45

And a family.

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Well, um

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I was really happy because I was in love with Rain.

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Nobody knew about our affair, and so I was still great friends with all of his family and indeed his wife, who I adored. And although this was absolutely deceitful, I could no more have walked away from him than flown to the moon. I was completely in love with him.

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So you eventually got married after Rain and Nan's divorce. How did she find out about your relationship? I wanted a baby really badly, and I did.

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become pregnant. And so we then told Nan that we had fallen in love and that we were going to have a baby, which must have been appalling for her because of course she she had no idea. She felt we were, you know, I was her friend. And so it was it was really terrible for her. But she was a wonderful woman and Rain was determined that we would stay friends. And he managed to do that. He managed to keep

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the family on side and uh Nan would come and stay with us in the country and she was like a

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God parent to my children.

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But what we didn't tell her was that we had been in love for thirteen years. We didn't tell her that he had been, you know, cheating on her all that time. And did you ever think about that? Feel bad that you didn't know?

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Yes, of course I did.

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I am not at all proud of the fact that I was an adulteress for all that time.

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But in a sense I

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I just don't think I had any option. I you know, I could not have left ever.

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Time for disc number five, Prue. What are we going to hear and why? It's sixteen tons.

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And it's Tennessee Ernie Ford singing it. There's something about this song which is about you just have to keep going, go on loading sixteen tons.

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And I I think I'm very dogged and determined.

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Some people say a man is made out of mud. A poor man's made out of muscle and blood. Muscle and blood and skin and bones. A mind that's weak and a back that's strong. You load sixteen tons. What do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt. Saint Peter, don't you call me cause I can go? I owe my soul to the company store.

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16 Tons by Tennessee Ernie Ford. So, Pruleith, after setting up the catering business, you opened your own restaurant and later launched a cookery school. Meanwhile, your home life had settled down. You and Rain had a son, Daniel, and you later adopted a daughter, Lida, from Cambodia. Why did you decide to adopt a baby?

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Well

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Rain had already brought up Nan's three children, and so he didn't want children, and I did, and so I had, you know, we agreed and we had Daniel, but he didn't want to add to the population anymore. He'd written a lot about China and Thailand, and so he knew that there were lots and lots of orphaned or unwanted babies in the Far East, and he just felt that, you know, it was wrong to go on having more children. So that's what we did. And being a huge success, and leader is an absolute delight.

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Last year you travelled to Cambodia with Lida to find out more about her past. It must have brought some complex emotions to the surface.

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The first time she went looking, w she was twenty one about and I remember saying to her, Look,

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She said, Are you worried about me doing this? And I said, No. I said, You know, if you don't love me now, if you don't regard me as your mum.

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Well, then I don't deserve to be your mum. So I knew that if she found her real mother or her birth mother, it wouldn't be a threat to my relationship. I never felt that. But when we got to Cambodia, and at one point we were really close and we thought we might have found her birth mother, and we did a DNA test, and

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I remember thinking.

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I so badly want this woman to be Lida's mother because it'll be at the end of a long search and it'll be so satisfying for Lida. And she was such a wonderful woman. But the DNA test revealed she wasn't her mother.

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Prue, it's time for your next piece of music, number six today, what is it?

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Aretha Franklin singing Skylark

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At one point, two of my friends and I decided that we would have singing lessons, and we hired between the three of us a really good singing teacher. And it was the only time I have been able to sing, because she was such a good teacher that she sort of managed to make me relax enough to stop my throat closing up in a kind of rictus that means no sound comes out at all.

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And um we used to sing Skyloud.

Dame Prue Leith24:18

Uh

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Yeah.

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Have you anything?

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Uh

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Uh

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To say to me.

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Won't you tell me where my love for me?

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Is there a meadow in the midst?

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Where someone

Dame Prue Leith24:46

But waiting to begin.

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Skylark Aretha Franklin

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Prue Leith, in 1993 you sold most of your Cookery Empire and you concentrated on writing and broadcasting for the next few years. Then four years ago you got the call from the Great British Bake Off. What was your reaction when they got in touch? Did you already know the show? Did you watch it? No, I didn't watch it. I'd heard of it. I knew that Mary Berry had decided not to go with it to Channel 4. And so it did occur to me, hmm, I wonder if I'd quite like that job. And then I dismissed it, thought, no, no, they won't want another old lady. You know Mary Berry well, I think. Yes, I do. Yes, I do. Did you talk to her before you accepted the job? I did. I asked her what Paul Hollywood was like.

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I think

Dame Prue Leith25:29

Yeah.

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Did you

Dame Prue Leith25:30

Uh

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Dare I ask what she said? Yes, yes, no, she said he's fine. She said he's very strong. You have to hold your own because, you know, he's very articulate and you know, if you don't jump in and get your opinion in, he'll have said it all and there'll be nothing left for you to say. You are sometimes accused by viewers of being a bit too focussed on calories. What do you say to that? Well, that's because I often say that's absolutely worth the calories or that's not worth the calories. Oh, this is worth every calorie, I'll say. Yum. I think beat, you know, they're a charity that try to tackle eating disorders. And they say that I mustn't say it because people then who have an eating disorder feel guilty, they feel unhappy, so they eat more.

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So perhaps I'll stop saying it.

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Prue, in your first year you accidentally revealed who'd won. I mean I did. That must have been a bit of a heart in the mouth moment. It was absolutely awful. I was having a siesta.

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In in Bhutan.

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And I picked up my phone and the first tweet I saw was one from the production company saying don't forget to congratulate the winner after ten o'clock.

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And I thought, oh my god, this is the final day. And I looked at my watch, I thought, it's after 10 o'clock.

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And so I quickly tweeted, bravo, Sophie. And then a text came whizzing in from Emma Freud.

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Which just said

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Eek, eek, it's tonight. Delete, delete. By then I was panicking so much I didn't know which button to press and I couldn't find them. How do you delete? So I I just rang up my secretary, which I do in every moment of panic. And I when as soon as she heard my voice, she said, Don't worry, I've deleted it.

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And she had deleted it eighty nine seconds after I'd done it.

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But it was too late. You know, somebody it had gone viral by then.

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How did you deal with the aftermath of a viral moment? Oh, I just felt so terrible. But I'll tell you what's interesting is that the Prime Minister of Bhutan

Dame Prue Leith27:41

Yeah.

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Rang me up and he was very nice. He said, You know, you mustn't worry about having to eat at the winner because he said it just means that you were thinking about your.

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your colleagues. But so then I said to him, Prime Minister, how come you're wa wasting your time? You know, you've got a country to run. What are you doing? talking to me about Beikov. And he said, oh no, he said, Prue, you have put Bhutan on the map.

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It's time for your seventh piece of music today, what have you gone for?

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Well, I've gone for Chopin's nocturn number two in E flat major. After my husband died, or about four years after my husband died, I actually fell in love with Ernest Hall, who's a really good pianist. And I thought at last I'm going to get somebody who'll teach me to sing and who will educate me in music. And he didn't do any of those things, but he did get me into Chopin.

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Chopin's nocturne number two in E-flat major, played by Elizabeth Leonskoya.

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Prouleith, as we've just heard, your husband Rain sadly died in two thousand and two, but years later you found love again with John Playfair, who you married in twenty sixteen.

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I think to meet somebody who you know you're going to spend the rest of your life with when you're 70 years old and for it to work so well is just too lucky to be true. So I hope it sticks. And what about Christmas? What does that mean to you? What do you like to cook at this time of year?

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I think I've cooked turkey more often than anything else, but we once we had Chinese pancakes with duck in them. Last year I had duck, I've had goose, I've had pork, beef. I've lived a long time, so I've had a go at everything. But I usually come back to turkey. Really good, beautiful turkey.

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I mean, one of the best Christmases we ever had was when

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A nephew of mine, making his breakfast early in the morning.

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cleared up after making a fry-up, and he turned off all the knobs on the oven.

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including the oven that I had just put in, this big shoulder of pork.

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which was to be our Christmas lunch, and it was going to be slow cooked, and so it was in there, and when I opened the oven at one o'clock to get it out, it was raw, absolutely stone raw, and cold.

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Anyway, we sliced it all up and we had fried pork slices for Christmas lunch. And it didn't matter, it was fine. Nobody minded.

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And of course, we're sending you off to the island, Prue. I wonder how you're feeling about it. Are you looking forward to it? Are you feeling worried?

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I've got to the age when I really don't like the idea of building a hut. I can't swim a river and I can't climb a coconut palm. So I think I'm going to have a hard time of it. Well, you've got one more track before we cast you away, Prue. Okay. Your final disc today. What are we going to hear? Shirley Maclean singing Big Spender.

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I love the exuberance of it. I love that female thing of being strutting and in charge.

Dame Prue Leith32:09

The minute you're walking the joint

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I could see you were a man of distinction.

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A real big spender.

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Good looking?

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So refined.

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Wouldn't you like to know what's going on in my mind? So let me get right to the point.

Dame Prue Leith32:33

I don't pop my cork for every guy I see

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Big Spender performed by Shirley McLean from the musical Sweet Charity.

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So, Pruleith, it's time to send you away to the island. I'm giving you the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare. You can have one other book. What will it be?

Presenter32:59

I should really have something that I have never been able to read, because stuck in a desert island with nothing else to do, it would force me to get past the first chapter. So either James Joyce's Ulysses or Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. All right, so you can only choose one. Which are you going to go for? Is it going to be the Madeline's or is it going to be Ulysses? No, I think it would be Ulysses. Okay. I think the Irish are more fun than the French.

Dame Prue Leith33:19

Yeah.

Presenter33:26

You can also have a luxury item. What would you like?

Presenter33:30

Some writing materials so that I can write another novel, or keep a journal, or keep sane.

Presenter33:38

And finally, which track of the eight that you've shared with us today would you save from the waves?

Presenter33:44

Do you know, I think I'd say Causy Sicule Africa.

Presenter33:48

It's got so many layers to it and it's such a wonderful sound and it would be just uplifting.

Presenter33:56

Dame Prue Leith, thank you very much for letting us hear your Desert Island Discs, and Merry Christmas!

Presenter34:01

Yes, indeed Happy Christmas

Presenter34:32

I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Prue. I wonder if she'll have a go at catching some lobsters while she's on the island. We've cast away many other chefs and restaurateurs including Tom Kerridge, Raymond Blanc and Monica Galetti. Prue's fellow Bake Off judges Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood are there too. You can find their episodes in our Desert Island Discs programme archive and through BBC Sounds. Next time my guest will be the writer and broadcaster Richard Osman. I do hope you'll join us.

Presenter35:01

Hang on a second, just before you go, given that you've listened all the way through to this podcast, would you like to find some more great listening?

Speaker 335:07

Podcast Radio Hour might be just what you need in your feed.

Presenter35:11

Q Trail

Speaker 335:13

Podcast Radio Hour on Radio 4 Extra.

Presenter35:15

This is the podcast that recommends great podcasts, Bitmatter, and meets the people that make them.

Speaker 335:20

So whether you're looking for comedy...

Presenter35:22

It's been painful to record because I've been laughing so hard. Conversations?

Speaker 335:27

Do you enjoy interviewing people, PJ?

Presenter35:29

Uh If

Speaker 335:30

Is it one of my Right? Here are activities to do. To me, horror is not a foreign country that you visit. It's very much the place we're inhabiting now.

Presenter35:37

Or documentaries.

Speaker 335:44

We've got it all and more on BBC Radio 4 Extra's Podcast Radio Hour.

Presenter35:49

Listen now on BBC Sounds.