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News [1]
Opinion [2]
Business [3]
Sport [4]
Life [5]
Style [7]
Entertainment [8]
Travel [9]

‘Like absolute fricking numpties, we borrowed an eye-watering sum of money, to live in a house that we couldn’t afford’ – Mel Giedroyc

It’s been a long and generally happy career for Mel Giedroyc, with no signs of slow-down. But TV isn’t that ‘giving’ to older women, she tells Emily Hourican. And so she has written her long-dreamed-of first novel

“Seven years of absolute joy”: Mel with Sue Perkins, on ‘The Great British Bake Off’, 2013

“We loved Mary and Paul from the word go”: Mel with fellow ‘Bake Off’ stars, Sue Perkins, Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood, in 2016. Photo Mark Bourdillon BBC/PA Wi

Mel Giedroyc and Sue Perkins in a TV ad for Kingsmill

Mel Giedroyc

“Seven years of absolute joy”: Mel with Sue Perkins, on ‘The Great British Bake Off’, 2013

“We loved Mary and Paul from the word go”: Mel with fellow ‘Bake Off’ stars, Sue Perkins, Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood, in 2016. Photo Mark Bourdillon BBC/PA Wi

Mel with husband Ben Morris

Mel Giedroyc and Sue Perkins in a TV ad for Kingsmill

Graham Norton

Stephen Fry

Dawn O'Porter

Richard Osman

Mel Giedroyc

April 04 2021 02:30 AM

In a way, it’s a wonder Mel Giedroyc — presenter, actor and writer — didn’t grow up hating books. “As a kid, I’d hear my elder brothers and sisters taking about ‘mum and Marcel Proust’, and I didn’t know who that was, and I thought mum had gone off with somebody called Marcel Proust. I think they were winding me up: ‘Mum really loves Proust.’”

That wasn’t even the worst of it.

“During those long summer holidays in the 1970s, my mum — I don’t think she even took her School Certificate (the rough equivalent of GCSEs today), but became a nurse and is the best-read person I know — would lock all the doors of the house with us outside, hail, rain or shine, and she would sit inside, smoking and reading Proust, in our cul-de-sac in Leatherhead.

“She’d even lock the doors of our Vauxhall Viva so we couldn’t get in there. If it was really pelting it down, she might open the door to the garage.”

Somehow Mel — who is just as warm, funny and exuberant by Zoom as she is on TV — managed not to grow up resenting books and reading. In fact she has written three of her own, including, now, her first novel, The Best Things.

This could have been written specifically in response to the Covid pandemic — a piece of funny, charming escapism, with just enough of a serious and positive message at its core to function as the perfect lockdown book — but in fact it’s simply a happy coincidence of timing.

“I have been wanting to write a novel for the last 15 years,” she says.

“But life and bringing up children and everything, and being slightly on the shambolic side in terms of my time organisation, prevented that.”

Not that she’s been dossing. As well as The Great British Bake Off, of course, Mel has presented Light Lunch, Mel and Sue, The Generation Game and many more, as well as film and drama roles.

“Seven years of absolute joy”: Mel with Sue Perkins, on ‘The Great British Bake Off’, 2013

The Best Things is set in Leatherhead — a place I initially assumed to be fictional, but is in fact an actual town in Surrey, where Mel grew up. It follows the story of the Parker family’s sudden plummet from affluence, with the action largely propelled by wife and mother, Sally.

She has been drifting through her over-privileged life until her childhood-sweetheart-made-good Frank loses his business, their home and their savings, almost overnight. What Sally does with this reversal of fortune is the basis for a book that is funny, touching and heart-warming.

“I was really obsessed with this idea of a hedge fund manager who wakes one morning and everything has collapsed into rubble around him,” says Mel.

“What he does with that? Coupled with the fact that, about 15 years ago, we had a bit of a financial knock in our own lives. Nothing like as dramatic as what happens to the Parkers, but still, quite scary.

“My kids were tiny and my work was very sporadic,” says Mel, whose two daughters are now 17 and 18.

“I was doing a lot of ‘being a parent’ at the time. But I had a fantastically cushy job making two adverts a year, with Sue [Perkins], for Kingsmill Bread. This paid for everything. One day, I get a letter from Kingsmill saying ‘thank you very much, we don’t need you any more…’ That’s showbiz,” she adds, with a very wry laugh.

Unfortunately, like so many others, Mel and husband Ben Morris, a TV director and drama school teacher, had borrowed heavily.

“It was a year when the banks were phoning you twice a day sometimes, saying, ‘yeah, borrow more money’. Like absolute fricking numpties, we borrowed an eye-watering sum of money, to live in a house that we really couldn’t afford.

“Me thinking ‘yeah, it’s great, it’ll be fine, Kingsmill…’ I can laugh about it now, but actually, I’ve still got a slight twitch in the eye when I think about it.”

Without the funds to keep paying the mortgage, the next move was to sell the house.

“And we couldn’t sell the house, that was the next thing. A housing crisis hit, and we couldn’t sell. I was thinking ‘shit, we are in real doo-doo.’”

Mel with husband Ben Morris

Fortunately, they did manage to sell.

“We rented a tiny little flat where we paid the rent to a guy in a lay-by up the A1. We put all our stuff in storage, we got rid of all our crap, a metaphorical and physical declutter.

“We were bundled into this tiny little flat, the kids were in a set of bunkbeds. We were rammed in next door to them, and we lived there for two years, and we were never happier. It was amazing. It was a real lesson That was a really lovely time.

“When we’d been in this situation of having a huge mortgage, and having this house — I mean, it wasn’t ridiculous, but it was too expensive for us, at the time, and I always felt a bit intimidated by it.

“Our mates — we were in our early thirties, and they were all still in flats and renting — and one friend, I remember said, ‘ooh, this is very grown-up’. And something inside me slightly died,” she laughs.

“We both come from very loving families, so we knew we would never be out on the street, we would never be in the Parkers’ position. But it was still kind of… I didn’t sleep properly for about a year. I’d wake up at 3.48 every morning going: ‘What’s going to happen? What’ll we do?’”

And yet, what she remembers most, Mel says, is “a feeling of immense relief at getting rid of everything, and living knowing that we could afford the rent and that we’d got rid of that awful…”

Millstone, I suggest?

“Exactly.”

She cautions: “I’m a terrible one for looking at the past with massive rose-tinted glasses – my husband laughs about this, I do really tinge the past with this incredibly luscious blush.”

She is also quick to emphasise: “I don’t want to be here preaching, ‘oh, isn’t it marvellous to have no money’. I don’t mean that, particularly when there are so many of us struggling to put food on the table.

“What I do mean is, I think I learned what the important things in life are. When you strip away the trappings, the booty, you’re forced to reckon: ‘Who am I? What do I have to offer the world? What do I have to offer my family?’ And my God, you know who your friends are.”

Her resilience is mostly innate — “I think my nature is definitely positive” — but some is perhaps learned. Mel’s father, Michal, who died in 2018, wrote his own book, Crater’s Edge, about his experiences as a child in Poland.

His family, Polish landowners, had their property seized and were deported to a Siberian Gulag, where Michal spent two years, before joining the Polish army and eventually arriving in Britain in 1947, with “nothing except his Polish army uniform and a watch”.

“It’s amazing that he survived Siberia,” Mel says. “That was down to his mum — a really strong and very spiritual woman, who kept them alive. My dad had an incredibly keen sense of humour, but he was also quite a serious guy. He was quite strict and we were always brought up to believe you do not strive for material goods, you strive for your education.

“I’m sure a lot of kids who come from parents who were immigrants are like that; I think you’re taught to graft, and I think all of my siblings share that. The idea that you’ve got to make something of yourself.”

Discussing her long career — Mel and Sue first began working together in the early 1990s — she is an endearing mix of the “rose-tinteds” and the pragmatic.

“I love my work and feel it’s an immense privilege to do what I do. It’s up and down — my God it is up and down — but on the whole, and again, the rose-tinteds are out, I’ve really enjoyed my career so far and I’m not intending to give it up any time soon.

“We loved Mary and Paul from the word go”: Mel with fellow ‘Bake Off’ stars, Sue Perkins, Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood, in 2016. Photo Mark Bourdillon BBC/PA Wi

“But I’m quite realistic about career stuff as well. I think there is something about reaching 50. I thought. ‘OK, I’m not going to be leaping around crazily forever’. TV is known, particularly for women, not to be particularly giving, that was in my mind. And so I thought, ‘I’ve always loved writing, now is the time’.”

It is, she says, “great being at the grand old age of 52. I don’t really care what people think about me anymore.”

So what about this idea of the invisible older woman?

“In terms of being an observer, and a writer, I think it’s absolutely brilliant,” she says with a laugh.

“I feel invisibility is like a superpower. I lead a pretty mellow life in terms of being recognised. I look really very scruffy on a day-to-day basis, so that’s good.”

As for what has changed for women in her profession over the course of her career, she says: “I’m an optimist. I think now is essentially a good time for women in comedy, actually.

“It seems to me there is much more of an actual community of women these days who are doing comedy. And they all know each other and support each other which is just fantastic.

“It didn’t really feel like that so much for Sue and I, particularly when we started out in the early 1990s. French and Saunders always kept an eye out for us and there was always a sense of kinship with them, which was great.”

As far as MeToo scenarios: “We’ve interviewed a fair few old-school men from the light entertainment firmament, and were always warned if they were likely to be ‘handsy’. I think we’ve always been protected by the fact there are two of us. Safety in numbers. Sad but true.”

It’s a famous truism of the entertainment industry that, as William Goldman put it, “no one knows anything”, and the story of Mel’s involvement with Bake Off would seem to support that.

“We made the first series and I phoned Sue pretty much every night and said ‘mate, that is the worst thing we’ve ever done!’ She was like, ‘yeah, what are we doing?’ We loved Mary and Paul from the word go, but we just thought, ‘what were we doing on this show?’ We thought, ‘no one’s going to watch it, so that’s fine…’

“Things you think are going to be the worst mistake you’ve ever made can turn out to be the best. It was seven years of absolute joy. It was amazing. Do I miss it? I think we were right to do what we did, and that we left the party when the party was still swinging, and that’s great.

“If I’m honest, there’s always a time — and it’s usually at the beginning of April — that I do have a little pang. That was the time we used to start filming. I get that, ‘oh, the tent, the bakers’, but I’m very happy that the show has remained as good and positive a force as it was meant to be. Always leave the sandwiches when they’re still fresh and not curling up at the edges.”

The Best Things by Mel Giedroyc is published by Headline Review and is out now, €12.99

Entertainer turned author: four to read

Richard Osman

Richard Osman
The Pointless presenter published his first novel in 2020, The Thursday Murder Club, set in a luxury retirement village where residents gather to investigate crime cases. The novel was apparently the subject of a 10-publisher auction, and sold for a seven-figure sum.

Graham Norton

Graham Norton
Host of his eponymous show since 2010, Norton is a five-time BAFTA winner, and published his first novel, Holding, in 2016, winning the Irish Book Award for Best Popular Fiction the same year. Since then he has published A Keeper, and most recently Home Stretch.

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry
Initially best known as a film and TV actor, Fry turned to presenting — most notably QI, for which he was BAFTA-nominated six times. His first novel, The Liar, was published in 1991, with three more to follow, including Making History, which won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History, The Hippopotamus and The Stars’ Tennis Balls, a modern retelling of the classic The Count of Monte Cristo.

Dawn O'Porter

Dawn O’Porter
As Dawn Porter, she presented the product-testing section of How to Look Good Naked , then documentaries exploring attitudes to nudity, lesbianism, dating and pregnancy. In 2012 she married Chris O’Dowd, changed her name to O’Porter, and in 2013 released her first novel, Paper Aeroplanes, loosely inspired by her own childhood in Guernsey. The Cows followed in 2016, with So Lucky in 2019.

Online Editors