Everyone’s favourite “domestic goddess” is set to give Paul Hollywood a run for his money in the innuendo stakes when she replaces Prue Leith in the GBBO tent.
Poppie Platt
One month into the year, UK television bosses have secured the shot in the arm primetime has been crying out for. Nigella Lawson, Britain’s sexiest and smartest TV chef, is officially replacing Prue Leith as host of The Great British Bake Off.
It’s a wise pick. No other TV chef has managed to entrance the British public quite like Lawson. Unlike Jamie Oliver, who deals in cheeky chappie banter and elaborately spiced, imaginative dishes, or Delia Smith, whose schoolmarmish air matches her traditional recipes, Lawson sells sensual cooking – her food is designed to entertain, and intended to fit into a modern woman’s routine; her descriptions of meals, delivered with a wink and often in cleavage-baring nightwear, are meant to titillate (who could forget her spin on an Eton mess, with its “bulging” strawberries yielding “their gorgeous juices”).
What better show for her to take on, then, than Bake Off, which has always masked copious innuendo with a respectable veneer of Union Jack flags and patchwork bunting?
Announcing her appointment as a judge on Instagram, Lawson wrote: “I’m uncharacteristically rather lost for words right now! Of course it’s daunting to be following in the footsteps of Prue Leith and Mary Berry before her, great dames both, but I’m also bubbling with excitement. The Great British Bake Off is more than a television programme, it’s a National Treasure – and it’s a huge honour to be entrusted with it. I’m just thrilled to be joining the team and all the new bakers to come, I wish the marvellous Prue all the best, and am giddily grateful for the opportunity!”
Leith gave her blessing in the comments below, saying she had been “so hoping it would be Nigella! Brilliant choice”.
Lawson is significantly more famous than Leith, who stepped into the “posh older woman slot” left open by Mary Berry’s departure in 2016. But unlike Leith, who learnt to cook at the prestigious Cordon Bleu institute and enjoyed a rich career as a restaurateur, before proving her judging chops on Great British Menu, Lawson is no classically trained pastry chef. Her cakes and bakes are typically simple – sponges, brownies, ready-made puff pastry rolled out from the fridge.
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One wonders whether she could successfully complete even half of the challenges Bake Off’s competitors take on. And another minor reservation: Lawson, so used to fronting her own shows, has yet to prove herself as a team player on UK TV. How might her star power translate to on-screen chemistry alongside veteran judge Paul Hollywood?
Overall, though, it’s a fabulous appointment. There has been a lingering sense that Bake Off’s best days are firmly behind it: the tasks having become too difficult, the hosts tired. Since moving from the BBC to Channel 4 in 2017, viewing figures have dropped from around 14 million (for the 2016 final) to four million for the most recent season. Nabbing Lawson would be a guaranteed ratings-booster. (Bake Off’s team were approached for comment on the news of a Lawson signing, but did not reply.)
Edd Kimber, 40, who won the first series of Bake Off in 2010, says: “Nigella is surely everyone’s dream judge for the show – she’s definitely one of mine… She has the magic ingredient that makes cooking and baking seem so approachable but also glamorous.”
One wonders whether Lawson could successfully complete even half of the challenges Bake Off’s competitors take on.
Born in London to journalist-turned-politician Nigel Lawson, who served as Chancellor of the Exchequer in Margaret Thatcher’s Cabinet, and J Lyons and Co. heiress Vanessa Salmon, Nigella was bright but feisty from a young age. She moved school nine times between the ages of nine and 18, later describing herself as “difficult, disruptive, good at school work, but rude, I suspect, and too highly-strung”.
It’s hard not to imagine that it is this spark of rebellion that lured in viewers to her television programs, too. In comparison to other female TV chefs, such as Berry, Smith or Jennifer Paterson and Clarissa Dickson Wright (known as the Two Fat Ladies), Lawson’s cut-glass accent and affluent background didn’t translate to stuffy manners on-screen. Rather, she shunned the typical formula for woman-fronted cookery shows – wholesome baking, innocent chit-chat, a sprinkling of domestic tips – in favour of ramped-up sex appeal and quick recipes that appealed to younger audiences.
After graduating from Oxford with a degree in Medieval and Modern Languages, Lawson worked as a book critic and restaurant reviewer, eventually taking a job at The Sunday Times as their deputy literary editor in 1986. But it was her move into the cookbook sphere, with 1998’s How to Eat – packed with easy, speedy recipes like pea risotto and chocolate Guinness cake – that kicked off a lucrative career as a cook.
Today, she has sold more than eight million cookbooks worldwide; since her first TV show Nigella Bites in 2000, she has hosted 10 cooking programs in the UK. Her net worth sits at an estimated £14m ($27.7m). With all her riches, one wonders why she has decided to take on a show as demanding, time-wise, as Bake Off – though it will certainly re-boost her public profile.
In both her cookbooks and TV shows, Lawson has always been quick to admit that she prefers no-fuss, no-nonsense recipes – that, God forbid, often utilise pantry and freezer staples and plenty of shortcuts (see her famous Marmite spaghetti, or Coca-Cola braised ham) – to slaving over the oven for hours on end.
When it comes to baking, it seems like she might leave the technical analysis to Hollywood; Lawson deals in cakes and puddings as reward, and honest pleasure, rather than laborious tasks. She once described cake baking as “one of the great culinary scams: it implies effort, it implies domestic prowess; but believe me, it’s easy” – easy for her to say, as someone never tasked with whipping up a croquembouche in just a few hours in a televised contest.
A publishing source attributes Lawson’s success to her position as an “aspirational brand”. “Every woman in Britain wants to be Nigella, to cook like her and look like her,” the executive, who has worked in food publishing for a decade, tells me.
Seema Pankhania, 28, a food influencer and cookbook author who has almost two million followers across Instagram and TikTok, agrees: “She [Lawson] has such a warm character – she’s a British icon, and everything people want to be in the kitchen,” she says. “She’s more about the taste and the feel than it [the bakes] being technically perfect. I’m excited to see her on screen again.”
Lawson’s popularity among the British public is such that even the double-edged sword of tragedy and scandal have failed to set her career back. She married her first husband John Diamond, also a journalist at The Sunday Times, in 1986, with whom she had two children. Diamond died after a very public battle with throat cancer in 2001, aged 47; after his death, she took a mere fortnight off work, saying she’s “not a great believer in breaks”. She then went on to marry the multi-millionaire art dealer and businessman Charles Saatchi in 2003. Their relationship, she has said, was volatile.
In June 2013, The Sunday People published photographs of Saatchi with his hands around Lawson’s neck, during an argument at Scott’s restaurant in Mayfair. He labelled the row a “playful tiff” and was consequently cautioned for assault, and Lawson left the family home in Chelsea. But the row escalated after their split, when it came out in court that Lawson had been using cocaine to deal with the emotional toll (which she described as “intimate terrorism”) of her marriage.
She came under further scrutiny when her housekeepers were accused of fraudulently spending almost £700,000 ($1.38m) on Saatchi’s credit cards, with the defendants, sisters Francesca and Elisabetta Gritto, saying Lawson had authorised the amounts to stop them revealing the extent of her drug usage to her husband. Lawson denied this; both Francesca and Elisabetta were eventually cleared of fraud in court.
Lawson has expressed remorse for her drug use, saying “I’m not proud of the fact I have taken drugs, but that does not make me a drug addict or a habitual drug user”. And even if the image of her picture-perfect life had been, fleetingly, damaged, Lawson was too popular – too secure in her position as a bona fide national treasure – for her career to suffer any major damage. She returned to primetime TV with Simply Nigella a little over a year after the scandal, with the first episode attracting more than two million viewers.
Lawson has slightly faded from public view in recent years, choosing to focus her energy on becoming a social media celebrity (she has 3.1 million followers on Instagram, where she regularly recommends new cookbooks and shares recipes). Her last BBC show was 2020’s lockdown-balm Nigella: Cook, Eat, Repeat, released in tandem with a bestselling cookbook of the same name, and since then her presence on-screen in the UK has mostly consisted of reruns of her festive specials. Here in Australia, Lawson has featured as a host and judge on My Kitchen Rules (2022-2023) and appeared as a guest judge on MasterChef Australia.
These Australian appearances hinted at a new chapter in her personal life: despite owning a £5m ($9.9m) historic mews house in London’s Chelsea, Lawson spends considerable time in Sydney. Last year she featured in an advertisement for Tourism Australia, alongside Robert Irwin, the son of the late conservationist and “Crocodile Hunter” Steve, and has said she feels “gorgeously at home” Down Under. She is currently single, with both her children – Cosima, 31, and Bruno, 28 – having flown the nest, meaning she’s free to roam around the world as she wishes.
Fans of both Bake Off and Lawson (myself included) will be ecstatic about the news. Just picture it: everyone’s favourite “domestic goddess”, giving Paul Hollywood a run for his money in the innuendo stakes.
The Telegraph, London
