Prue Leith’s new series Prue Leith’s Cotswold Kitchen may have the 85-year-old chef’s name in the title, but Prue is quick to admit she is no longer the star of her own show.
“In this series, there is a bit more of my husband, John]Playfair]. He almost talks about it like it’s his show now and I’m a sort of walk-on party”, she says. “I have an interesting person to talk to and cook with, and John goes off and discovers things that are happening in the Cotswolds”.
In each of the 10 episodes, a celebrity stops by Prue’s countryside home to show off their cooking skills, and one in particular got on famously with Prue’s husband. “One of the guests I enjoyed seeing the most was Lulu. What actually amused me was that she originally came from Glasgow, but she doesn’t sound very Scottish. John is Scottish, so as soon as they met, he greeted her in an exaggerated Glasgow accent, and the two of them were off then. They ended up singing together”!
The series comes as a welcome break from the long days of filming Prue is used to on The Great British Bake Off.
“I have never enjoyed filming so much as I do filming at home. It’s a lovely house and the kitchen sort of comes into its own when there are a lot of people in it”, she says. “I am quite gregarious anyway, so we got really chummy with the whole crew and it just felt like a great big family party all the time. I loved it – I quite missed it when they all went away.
” For example, Bambi, who does my make-up, would bang on my door at about eight o’clock in the morning with a cup of tea in her hands and say, ‘ Wake up and get into the make-up chair. ‘ Whereas if I’m filming Bake Off, I have to sometimes get up at four or five o’clock in the morning to drive. So that was just lovely. “
Earlier this month, Prue revealed that she has made a change in her life – she now wears hearing aids. Speaking to students in a Q&, A at the Cambridge Union, the Channel 4 star interrupted the conversation to say:” Sorry, I am a bit deaf so I am struggling to hear a bit. This is so embarrassing because I really can’t hear at all. My husband is so cross with me as I have just been given some hearing aids and I never remember to put them in. I am so sorry. “
In 2021, Prue wrote about hearing aids in her agony aunt column in The Telegraph when a reader wrote to her saying her father was struggling to wear them. At the time Prue wrote:” This is a really common problem. When my mother was in her 80s, she was beginning to go deaf and senile at the same time. “
” She was convinced we all mumbled, and actors didn’t speak clearly anymore. The problem was that we’d left it too late. By the time we’d persuaded her to wear hearing aids, she’d forget what they were, fish one out shouting, ‘ What’s this thing doing in my ear? ‘ and hurl all two grand’s worth across the room. “
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Source: Mirror
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