Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A TV presenter and comedian, best known as co-host of The Great British Bake Off alongside Mel Giedroyc, and for her travel documentaries and memoir.
On the island
Eight records
You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)
For someone who just gases off continuously, the only time when I'm not talking is when I'm dancing, and I love dancing. And I'm not a great dancer. I think you might have witnessed some of my dancing. I mean, it's expressive, is it not? I think that would be one word. I don't do things by halves. So I'm like this sort of electrocuted octopus when I go on the dance floor. And I'm not a young buck anymore, but it doesn't matter. I will just go for it with the same vim and pep as I had when I was in my twenties. And this track is Sylvester, You Make Me Feel.
So this is the first track I ever remember hearing. And this is Lonnie Donnegan's Rock Iron and Line. And my dad was a great dancer and it reminds me of him. This track builds and it's that sense of excitement that I get if I go clubbing when you're waiting for the deep bass to kick in. It's about waiting, it's about pleasure delay, it's about seeing for me my dad just gently sort of bouncing up and down and corralling all of us kids to get ready for the big moment when the song explodes and I just love it and it reminds me of family and I can see our front room with that awful swirly 70s carpet and the stink of sort of frayed bentos pie simmering in the 1970s oven and overcooked cabbage sort of limp and beige and just pure joy at having the privilege of these people being my blood relatives.
I love the Smiths. But I've picked how Sudan is now simply because of the lyric I'm the son and heir of a shyness that is criminally vulgar. I'm the son and heir of nothing in particular. And a big shout out to Johnny Maher, who just provides these searing guitar moments that just elevate that song into something truly, truly special. And I don't think anyone can listen to a Smith song and not scream your lungs out in recognition of what it's like to feel odd.
Well, now this has a very very special place in my heart. This is T-Rex, 20th Century Boy, and this track reminds me of an old Polish woman I know called Melanie Gedrocz. And sometimes we will just leave messages on one another's phone, which will just be, ah! Which will mean that, you know, the singers in this track. So this is for her.
Moments of PleasureFavourite
Kate Bush is an artist that I have loved, loved since I was a child and her music has always been with me. When I talked about, you know, applying and getting into Cambridge, it was Hounds of Love that I would listen to. And I would turn the record over and over and over and over. And I love her because she's wistful and sentimental. I love her because she loves family. I love her because so much of her stuff is rooted in nature and the environment and what it is to feel in awe of birdsong and the rustle of trees. This is moments of pleasure because it's such so exquisite, but also it's just about looking back on one's life, just cherry-picking those single moments that give you pause and make your heart sore.
Emma Kirkby, James Bowman, Academy of Ancient Music, Christopher Hogwood
Sometimes I think I I talk. And I'm sociable to avoid silence and solitude. Because those are the times where I'll really feel the stuff that's happened to me. And this is Pergoles' Starbat Martyr. This is a piece, the architecture, which is very much based on sort of. Pain and resolution, pain and resolution, pain and resolution, a crunching together and then a release. That's what life is of course, but I listen to it and I give myself permission to cry and I give myself permission to go to those dark spaces that words can't possibly hope to describe.
This is an extraordinary track for me. This is Northern Sky by Nick Drake. It's one that makes me cry a lot. But also when I was going through this really difficult time when I was 40 and I'd ended this big relationship and was slowly going mad, I would listen to it. And then years later, I saw a picture of Nick Drake. And Nick Drake is walking his dog and I love dogs. But he happened to be walking his dog past the exact flat that I was living in when I was losing my mind. And the synchronicity of the universe is a source of wonderment. This is a very special track for me.
This last piece of, I love Philip Glass, I think Philip Glass is just the gateway to so many interesting different types of music, but I'm picking him because of a very particular evening in Edinburgh. And Anna and I just got together, and it was a difficult time. And I thought, I think she likes Philip Glass, and Philip Glass is playing. It was just one of those moments where everything comes together. And we sat down and we were in the circle of the King's Theatre. And Philip Glass came out and he played what I now know is Anna's favourite piece of music and one of my favourites too. And without having to even look at each other, we were holding hands and we just cried our eyes out. And at that moment, that piece of music was being played just for us. And in all the horror of sometimes what it's like to be alive, isn't it just wonderful?
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:55When you think about a sojourn onto this island all alone, how does it leave you feeling?
Pure terror. Does it? It does because I'm never alone. I've rather happily constructed a life where I'm always with another, a partner, with friends and family, where my work is incredibly sociable. And my entire reason for being is to connect with people and to understand what makes them tick. And to just be around palm trees and water, much as I love nature, will be so disorientating. And I have a sort of almost a sort of shimmer of anxiety thinking about it.
Presenter asks
2:58How much of a wrench was it leaving Bake Off, and after so many series, was there a bit of you that thought you were sad but also felt you could do with a bit of freedom?
It's a complicated brew, actually, that there was lots of things going on. I think it was an extraordinary chunk of my life, and it shepherded me through. It was one sort of continuum in a seven years that were full of quite a lot of upheaval in my own life. We were running out of puns. I'm not going to lie, Kirsty. There's only so many in the tank. I think when we had a Croatian bun, and I said rather loudly it had split, and I thought I have really, really sunk to the very bottom of what is possible in my, you know. And, you know, every bap pun, every Hungarian ring pun was just mind and mind and mind. And we did a Tudor week, and some of the puns there were absolutely horrific. That's an Aragon. Absolutely terrible. A really awful, really awful. But I would have carried on doing it, I think. It was a really sweet show. I loved the crew, and I loved the director, and I loved the bakers, and I sort of loved all of it. But there was one point, I will be honest, where I did think, can I do this forever? Which was when I had come back from my travels, and it was a programme I did in the Mekong River, and I had been travelling from the mouth in Ho Chi Minh to the source in Tibet. And four days before I came to the Bake Off tent, I had been with the first family of the Mekong in Tibet who had no electricity and no running water. And they would have yak butter and barley, and that's all they ate. And they would meditate and be in bed by six. And then four days later, I was in a tent where somebody was crying because they couldn't find the packet of marong glase. And I did think, how can I rationalize these two worlds? But I miss it, and I also wish it well. There's no point in rancor.
The keepsakes
The book
The luxury
A little bit of hair from my naughty ex-Beagle pickle
A little bit of hair from my naughty ex-Beagle pickle.
Presenter asks
6:43What makes you laugh?
I have sort of a bro a broad taste, I suppose. Sometimes a really nuanced, really fillesced satirical kind of sentence can make me guffour, but equally just a really well timed burp. Do you know what I mean? It's just a beautiful, beautiful. I once accidentally did a burp whilst opening the fridge that sounded like a fridge door opening, and I laughed for 15 minutes. I thought I was going to die. And I think. The great thing about humour is it connects you to your childish self. I'm not snobbish about jokes and I'm not snobbish about where they come from. And if something makes me laugh, I'll accept it for what it is and be truly grateful.
Presenter asks
7:20What's the appeal of making these documentaries that take you away for months in difficult conditions? Why do you put yourself through that?
I ask myself that a lot, and people who care about me ask that a lot. And there's this sort of perverse need always in me to push myself. I come back always with, you know, a sort of payload of E. coli or some such. But what I get from it is a sense of connecting with people who I am sort of practically as far removed from as po my my life is as far removed from theirs as it's humanly possible to be. I can flick a switch and I have light. I can turn on the shown and I have warm water. There was one time when we were travelling and we were in Ratnakiri in northern Cambodia. and all the translators just left. It's the Kurung tribe I went to to see and in order to understand to get the translation across, we'd need to go from English to Khmea, from Khmea to another tribal dialect, and from that dialect to Kurung. But there were no translators. So you're stuck in this clearing with Thirty women looking at you. And you have to find a way of saying we're all the same. And it was a fart gag that did it in the end. But also, I managed to sit down, they asked me to sit down, and I managed to sit down on an enormous pile of pig poo. And that was a real icebreaker. And they thought I was a spectacular idiot. But through just looking, just looking at them and holding their hands and laughing, I managed to spend nearly three days with them. And I was walking through a cashew forest with one of them holding my hand. And I just loved this woman so much. I thought, how can I feel so strongly about a stranger with whom I don't share a language? And um I just said to her, I really f feel I've known you all my life and she muttered something back. She was smoking a very long pipe, I remember. And about two months later when the translation came back and the show was ready to be sort of edited and voiced. They wrung me up and said you need to watch this. And there's me saying, I think I've known you all my life, and the translation came back, and she said I think I've known you all my life. And that's why I do it, because in all the hardship and madness and all the filth. There's just this reminder that we're all the same, and there's this reminder that you can have these immense, profound moments of. Solidarity, and I and I that's what I always look for.
Presenter asks
14:21What do you feel your oddness to be?
Same as everyone else's oddness, that that sense of being outside, looking in. And I used to think that was a peculiar thing to being a teenager, but of course it sort of endures. I'm sure everybody would say that. Sometimes I felt like an outsider because I was a woman, sometimes uh because I don't have kids, sometimes because I'm gay, sometimes because I'm not twenty any more. It there's always a reason to be outside the glass.
Presenter asks
17:41What made you decide to study English at Cambridge?
Genuinely? It's because one of my teachers told me that I should study something other than English at a polytechnic, or maybe not bother. And all my life I have I'm a contrary soul, and if I'm told I can't, I will. I think it was a combination of of of the two. I certainly at school was um not a consistent people. So your report cards would have been sort of all A's and all E's, would they? Exactly that. Right. Exactly that. And I certainly was unruly, and particularly in science and math, which I didn't fully embrace. And I think because there was that huge bandwidth between me doing, well, you know, the A's and the E's. I think they'd never thought I'd I'd amount to very much. I mean, f m one of my report cards I remember saying, What Susan lacks in intelligence, she makes up for in stupidity. I'm not joking. I'm not joking. That stayed with me, you know. I hope you framed that and put it in the moo. Well, for for a for a for a long time I had that that that thing um that I said about, you know, I I need to go to a you know, a college and not do English. That was on my wall for a while. And I just sort of as soon as I'd been told I couldn't, I took myself slightly out of school and I started to read a lot on my own. And and I remember going to my dad and I said, Dad, what's what's the best university? And neither of my parents went to university of my mind said, so I think Cambridge is the best. And so I said, All right, I'll go there then. And because I was so unaware of what that would involve and I was unaware of the magnitude of it and that there wasn't any pressure on my shoulders to do anything or be anyone, I did it. But you had to br did you have to work very hard to get in? Did you have to really sort of apply yourself with determination to get the results? Well, the thing is, I remember my dad driving me, put on his best camel coat, and he got in the car, which was a knocked old Peugeot, and we sort of puttered up to Cambridge and I'd got an interview and we just thought we'd be there for half an hour. And then it transpired that actually it was a whole day of interviews and an exam. And Those interviews, as terrifying as they were, were the sort of making of me because they got to see who I was. And because I had been spending a lot of time th you know, really considering what I felt about Wuthering Heights or what I felt about Tess of the Derbville or what I felt about Hamlet, I was able to talk about it. So they actually gave me an offer that was achievable.
“We were running out of puns. I'm not going to lie, Kirsty. There's only so many in the tank. I think when we had a Croatian bun, and I said rather loudly it had split, and I thought I have really, really sunk to the very bottom of what is possible in my, you know. And, you know, every bap pun, every Hungarian ring pun was just mind and mind and mind. And we did a Tudor week, and some of the puns there were absolutely horrific.”
“I ask myself that a lot, and people who care about me ask that a lot. And there's this sort of perverse need always in me to push myself. I come back always with, you know, a sort of payload of E. coli or some such. But what I get from it is a sense of connecting with people who I am sort of practically as far removed from as po my my life is as far removed from theirs as it's humanly possible to be. I can flick a switch and I have light. I can turn on the shown and I have warm water. There was one time when we were travelling and we were in Ratnakiri in northern Cambodia. and all the translators just left. It's the Kurung tribe I went to to see and in order to understand to get the translation across, we'd need to go from English to Khmea, from Khmea to another tribal dialect, and from that dialect to Kurung. But there were no translators. So you're stuck in this clearing with Thirty women looking at you. And you have to find a way of saying we're all the same. And it was a fart gag that did it in the end. But also, I managed to sit down, they asked me to sit down, and I managed to sit down on an enormous pile of pig poo. And that was a real icebreaker. And they thought I was a spectacular idiot. But through just looking, just looking at them and holding their hands and laughing, I managed to spend nearly three days with them. And I was walking through a cashew forest with one of them holding my hand. And I just loved this woman so much. I thought, how can I feel so strongly about a stranger with whom I don't share a language? And um I just said to her, I really f feel I've known you all my life and she muttered something back. She was smoking a very long pipe, I remember. And about two months later when the translation came back and the show was ready to be sort of edited and voiced. They wrung me up and said you need to watch this. And there's me saying, I think I've known you all my life, and the translation came back, and she said I think I've known you all my life. And that's why I do it, because in all the hardship and madness and all the filth. There's just this reminder that we're all the same, and there's this reminder that you can have these immense, profound moments of. Solidarity, and I and I that's what I always look for.”
“Fear, a prickling of fear, giving way to an extraordinary sense of freedom. You have that moment of oh my God, I am I am going to do this and then you set yourself free and you're just buffeted by the currents, in this case the audience, and you don't know where it's going, but you just have this blind faith that everything's going to be okay. And whereas some people might ascribe That to a feeling of pure terror, to not know where you're going, to not know the destination. Weirdly for me, I just find that. That's my safe space. God, I sound mad now. I sound properly insane. But when it goes well, when you're just improvising and playing with an audience, it's just it's so liberating. I love it.”
“So the Victorian show that we did, they wanted to focus on women and they did a a hormone profile and as you say I was asked to stay behind and I just didn't think anything of it. And in this small very clinical white little side room this woman said your bloods are very awry and you have a brain tumour. And There's always a delay for me. It's only really now that I consider the epic destruction this tiny little rice shaped thing in my pituitary glance has caused. And so I said, Oh, thank you very much and I went away and I don't even think I did anything about it for months because I didn't want to know. She had, I think, said it would was benign, but of course benign is very different from non-symptomatic. So I had a benign and extremely symptomatic brain tumor, which then started to kind of make its presence felt. I then went and had an MRI eventually, and then I went and had a a consultation with a very eminent endocrinologist He asked me if I had kids and I said no I don't and he said well you can't have them. And then I went out. And I think then I did cry and I wrung my my ex. I sat on a pavement. And um it was the beginning of a very, very dark time. And of course when you've got something in your head, you don't know whether what you're feeling is real or not. And I got diagnosed when I was thirty-eight. By the time I was forty, I literally destroyed my life from the inside out. And it was only six months ago when I went for a second opinion and started medication. And the second endocrinologist looked at my bloods and said, But you must have behaved in ways that would confound people who loved you. And you must have been in such unimaginable confusion and anxiety and delirium. Did you do something that you regret? And I just lost it. I just lost it. I always like to think I'm accountable for everything that I do, good and bad. But I'll never understand how I did some of the things that I did. You know, I walked out of my life, I ended a relationship. One day I'd be catatonic with depression, the next I'd be at heart attack levels of anxiety. I would one day be showing a hormone profile that was just zero. Zero estrogen, zero progesterone, zero testosterone, with huge levels of prolactin. And the next day I'd be completely normal. And Because I put up and shut up, because this is another challenge that that must be met, I did nothing about it. And it's as I say, it's taken this time to kind of look at the wreckage and to piece it together and to say sorry and to make amends and to be healthy and to be better and that's a lifelong battle I think. The problem with this condition is there's no continuum. But God, I'm lucky because it might be symptomatic, but it's benign.”
“The the most profound example of that, and one that caused me such unimaginable pain, was when the book came out. I had written about the brain tumour that I have. And the day that the papers got hold of that story, they published it on the front page, I think it was five national newspapers, was the day or the day after that I discovered that my dad had a terminal. Branching. And so it was bake off star in brain tumor shock or whatever. And I stood in a news agent and I just thought I'm going to lose my legs because no one knows what's going on. And I just wanted to scream, saying, But I'm okay and my dad isn't okay. And it was immensely painful. I this extraordinary Brilliant man who taught me how to ride a bike and made up stories when when I had the mumps, and who had such a an extraordinary, precise, brilliant, funny way about him, started to lose his mind. Although rather brilliantly, I said to him, I think he maybe maybe it was a month before he died. I said, you know, Dad, you've always promised you'd you'd play chess with me. My dad was a brilliant chess player. And I'm useless. And he beat me in twenty moves. And they said, Oh, come on, old girl, try. And then he beat me in nine. And I just loved him for that. But um yeah, so it has been a very challenging time and I think the best thing that I can do to honour him is to get myself sorted and to take that time knowing it's not a life-threatening condition to at least make myself right.”