Mel Giedroyc called her agent on day one, series one, and asked to get out. She says an 18-hour shoot left everyone on Bake Off in tears.
Series one had barely started when she phoned her agent and said she wanted out. What she describes happening inside the tent that day, and what producers asked of her, explains the call. She spoke up at a meeting afterward, and she says things changed.
Mel Giedroyc recalls the chaotic first day of The Great British Bake Off and why she confronted production
Mel Giedroyc has said she tried to leave Great British Bake Off on her very first day. She pointed to filming conditions she called brutal. Tears from contestants marked that opening day, she admitted, and she says that left her no choice but to speak out.
She made the admission on the How To Fail podcast. Quitting was close, she confessed. The end of an 18-hour opening day on set was when she raised her concerns with production.
Casting her mind back to the show’s earliest days, Mel said: “Day one, series one – I phoned my agent and I said, ‘I want out of this’.”
Chasing after contestants in tears was what production encouraged her to do, she admitted. The aim was drawing as much out of them as possible. Everything was wanted in real time, she said, and that produced plenty of chaotic rushing around the tent. She imitated producers shouting: “‘They’re having a breakdown! Move the cameras quickly!'”
The atmosphere shocked her, she said, and nothing in her career had prepared her for it. “I’ve never done this before in my life but it had been an 18-hour shoot, and everyone was in tears,” she continued.
A summit meeting gave her the opening. She told the room that the programme they were making was not the one they wanted to make, and she objected to a set-up where everyone ended up crying. Change was necessary; she made it “very clear” to production that if they were to deliver the show, they were committed to creating.
Threatening to walk sat outside her character entirely, she added. “I’ve never threatened anything like that in my life,” she said. “I’m just not that kind of person.”
Staying silent would have made things really grim, in her view, so she spoke.
Her intervention worked. Things changed after that day, she said, and the tent settled into something closer to the programme viewers came to know.
WOULD YOU HAVE SPOKEN UP LIKE MEL DID?
Originally reported by Ashna Gaur on Reality Tea
