Prue Leith: “You can’t have it all!” How to ask for help with work and family
Happy Place
Fearne Cotton
4.6 • 15.2K Ratings
🗓️ 1 September 2025
⏱️ 73 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Can women have it all? Renowned restauranteur, cookery writer, and Great British Bake Off judge Dame Prue Leith doesn’t think so.
In this chat with Fearne, Prue explains why she’s glad she built her career before having children, and why no one should feel ashamed of asking for help with their business or family in order to keep everything afloat.
Prue – who had the confidence to found a restaurant when she’d never worked in one – gives advice on never letting a lack of knowledge get in the way of starting a new passion project.
She also tells the story of finding love again at 70 after being widowed, and explains why she’s so passionate about legalising assisted dying.
The Great British Bake Off returns to Channel 4 on Tuesday 2nd September.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and a massive welcome to Happy Place with me Fern Cotton. This is the show that gives you the |
| 0:06.6 | confidence to live life on your own terms. Today I'm chatting to Dame Prue Leith. I've been talking about |
| 0:13.5 | chutzpah. I had never worked in a restaurant, but I opened one. I'd never taught anybody to cook, |
| 0:22.1 | but I opened a cookery school. |
| 0:26.8 | Lack of knowledge has never seemed to have got in my way. |
| 0:30.0 | I'll learn as I go, you know. |
| 0:33.0 | I would not have been a good full-time mother. |
| 0:37.3 | I would have found a company of young children all the time boring. Oh my God, bloody how are we in September? What is going on? At the start of the summer holidays, I felt like I was at the foot of a mountain. Like, how am I going to get through it? The juggle of kids and work. And somehow, we're back to school. We're like, are we hurtling towards Christmas? Am I saying that? I think I am. |
| 0:56.5 | I'm a Virgo. My birthday is the 3rd of September. So I love this time of year. I want to go to a |
| 1:04.4 | stationery shop and buy a new pencil case, even though I'm not going to school, and rulers and |
| 1:09.3 | stationary, and I want everything neat and organized, and I want to get into a little routine. |
| 1:13.5 | This feels to me like the new year, September. |
| 1:16.3 | I bloody love it. |
| 1:18.4 | I'm having a spring clean in September. |
| 1:20.9 | I'm getting all the stationery. |
| 1:22.4 | I'm getting my shit together, guys. |
| 1:24.1 | That's where I'm at. |
| 1:25.8 | You might not feel as motivated, but this is virgo season this is |
| 1:29.6 | what virgo's do in September also can I just say if you came to our tatton park happy place festival |
| 1:36.4 | thank you from the bottom of my heart I can't believe that we've done it again two festivals |
| 1:42.3 | this summer so grateful to every single one of you |
| 1:45.8 | who turned up. It was just, it's a beautiful thing. It's something I look forward to so massively |
... |
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