Paul Hollywood

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 29 March 2015

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is Paul Hollywood.

One of the UK's leading artisan bakers, he's a judge, together with Mary Berry, on BBC One's the Great British Bake Off. The programme enjoyed viewing figures of 15.6m for the 2014 final and has won two BAFTAS.

Born and brought up in Wallasey in the Wirral, Paul studied sculpture at art school before joining his father's bakery business. He went on to work at the Chester Grosvenor, Cliveden and was head baker at The Dorchester. Following his success at some of the UK's top hotels, he travelled extensively through Cyprus, Egypt and Jordan discovering ancient techniques for baking bread. It was in Cyprus that he first appeared on camera. On his return to the UK he began his TV career co-presenting two series with the chef James Martin.

Paul has judged five series of The Great British Bake Off and celebrity versions for Sport Relief and Comic Relief - all alongside Mary Berry. He has published several best-selling books on baking and is a regular contributor to food magazines and writes a column for The Daily Telegraph.

Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.
0:06.0	For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.
0:10.0	For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk.
0:17.0	Radio 4. My My castaway this week is Paul Hollywood, an artist Anne Baker he's brought a lifetime
0:40.1	of skill and knowledge about red cakes, pies and pastries out of the kitchen and onto our TV screens.
0:46.5	As a judge in the hugely popular Great British Bake-off, when he dishes up the criticism,
0:51.9	the oven gloves are most definitely off with a flash of
0:55.0	those famous blue eyes and a dig at their soggy bottoms he makes grown men and women crumble
1:00.2	on national TV so what separates him from so many of the hammed up
1:04.8	tele-tough guys that populate reality shows these days? Well, he's for real. At 14 he
1:11.5	was in his dad's back shop putting the jam in the donuts. By his early 20s he was
1:16.1	head baker at the Dorchester. His award-winning first book 100 Great Reds has been translated
1:22.0	into seven languages. To watch him deftly twist and
1:25.9	coil a savory briosh coron is to watch a man clearly at one with his craft. He says,
1:31.6	you know where you stand with me? I've always been like that, not just on
1:34.4	bake-off, but with the lads that work with me in the bakery because, well, that's what my dad was like with me.
1:40.2	So welcome, Paul Hollywood. It makes good TV, of all that shooting from the lip but I wonder why you know on TV it's a make-believe world. Why do you feel you have to be honest? I think you have to be I mean last year's bake-off funny enough enough I found it very difficult to judge because the
1:55.4	standard was just so high it threw me for about two weeks and everyone's saying
2:00.6	Paul's being easy on him this year and so what I did was move my bar up and then people
2:06.8	started falling into the traps again. If they do something wrong I'm not going to turn around
2:10.8	and say it's good because that would be a lie.
2:13.2	Well you don't have to say it's good but you could say look I know you've put your heart and soul into this but you maybe,
	...

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