Sue Perkins has moved between comedy, factual television, radio and writing without settling into a single on-screen role. She first became widely known alongside Mel Giedroyc, her friend from Cambridge, and later reached a broad audience as a co-presenter of The Great British Bake Off. Her career also includes historical food programmes, travel documentaries, panel shows, a sitcom she wrote and starred in, and a long-running place in British radio comedy.
Cambridge and the making of Mel and Sue
Born Susan Elizabeth Perkins on 22 September 1969 in Croydon, London, Perkins grew up with her parents and two younger siblings. She attended Croham Hurst School in South Croydon before studying English at New Hall, Cambridge, where she graduated in 1991. She joined the Cambridge Footlights and met Mel Giedroyc there; in the academic year 1990–91, Perkins was the society’s president.
Perkins and Giedroyc began performing and writing together as Mel and Sue. Their early television work included writing for French and Saunders, with occasional appearances on the BBC series. They were shortlisted for the Daily Express Best Newcomers award at the Edinburgh Festival in 1993. Channel 4’s lunchtime programme Light Lunch gave the duo a regular presenting role, followed by the early-evening Late Lunch, which ran from March 1998 to February 1999.
The partnership remained active as their careers broadened. They returned to television together for an ITV daytime chat show, Mel and Sue, in 2015, and later presented a new version of The Generation Game for BBC One. Their work together became a distinctive strand of Perkins’s career, while her solo projects gave her room to take on presenting, acting, writing and documentary roles.
From historical food to the Bake Off tent
In 2007, Perkins and food critic Giles Coren presented Edwardian Supersize Me, a BBC programme in which they spent a week eating the equivalent of a wealthy Edwardian couple’s diet while wearing period clothing. It led to The Supersizers Go... and The Supersizers Eat..., series that applied a similar experiment to different periods of history. Their subjects included Second World War rationing, the English Restoration, the Victorian era, the 1970s, the Elizabethan period and the Regency.
Perkins also demonstrated an appetite for unfamiliar disciplines on screen. In 2008 she won the BBC Two series Maestro, in which celebrity contestants learned to conduct orchestral, choral and operatic music. She later guest-conducted the London Gay Symphony Orchestra, conducted the Dinnington Colliery Band as part of A Band for Britain, and appeared with the BBC Concert Orchestra at the 2011 Comedy Prom. She is also listed as an associate conductor of the Orion Orchestra, a London-based ensemble of students and graduates from music colleges.
In 2010, Perkins and Giedroyc began presenting The Great British Bake Off, a baking competition in which each episode focused on a different aspect of baking. They stayed for seven series, first on BBC Two and then BBC One. When the programme moved to Channel 4 under a new deal from 2017, both presenters announced they would not continue. Their six-year partnership with the programme remains one of the best-known chapters of Perkins’s television career.
Her television work during this period ranged well beyond the baking tent. She appeared on panel and quiz programmes including QI, Have I Got News for You and Mock the Week, and presented or co-presented programmes such as All Roads Lead Home, The Culture Show and Giles and Sue Live the Good Life. In 2013, she created, wrote and starred in the Channel 4 sitcom Heading Out, playing its lead character, Sara.
Journeys on television and a continuing radio presence
Travel and place became recurring subjects in Perkins’s factual work. In World’s Most Dangerous Roads, she travelled the Dalton Highway in Alaska with Charley Boorman and later drove the Ho Chi Minh Trail with Liza Tarbuck. In 2014 she presented The Mekong River with Sue Perkins, travelling from the Mekong delta towards Tibet. She followed it with the one-off Kolkata with Sue Perkins and, in 2019, the two-part BBC series Japan with Sue Perkins.
Later programmes took her to other settings, including the US–Mexico border, the United States and Thailand. In 2022 she presented the three-part series Perfectly Legal; in 2024, Channel 5 broadcast Sue Perkins: Lost in Alaska and Sue Perkins: Lost in Thailand, while Channel 4 showed Sue Perkins’ Big Adventure: Paris to Istanbul. She also presented the BBC Two series Chess Masters: The Endgame in 2025. These projects sit alongside lighter formats: she competed as Dragon on The Masked Singer, finished fourth on the sixteenth series of Taskmaster, and co-starred with Giedroyc in the comedy series Hitmen.
Radio has provided a second, sustained strand of work. Perkins chaired Radio 4’s The 99p Challenge and was a panellist on The News Quiz, The Personality Test and Dilemma, among other programmes. After appearing regularly on Just a Minute, she became one of its guest hosts following Nicholas Parsons’s death. In 2021, she was announced as the programme’s permanent host, beginning with its 87th series. Her radio work also includes the comedy series Nature Table, recorded at ZSL London Zoo, and regular participation in Count Arthur Strong’s Radio Show!
Writing, health and later projects
Perkins’s writing includes television scripts and books. Her memoir, Spectacles, was published in 2015. In 2018 she published East of Croydon: Blunderings Through India and South East Asia, an autobiographical travel book shortlisted for Autobiography of the Year at the National Book Awards. She was also a judge for the 2009 Man Booker Prize. Her solo comedy work has included two Edinburgh Fringe shows: Spectacle Wearer of the Year in 2005 and The Disappointing Second Show in 2006.
In 2015, Perkins said she had been diagnosed with prolactinoma, a benign growth on the pituitary gland, eight years earlier. She discussed the condition publicly, including its effects on her health. In 2025, she and Giedroyc launched the Audible podcast Mel and Sue: Should Know by Now, bringing their long-running creative partnership into a new format. Across the stage, television, radio and page, Perkins has continued to move between collaborative comedy and projects led by her own interests.
Why Sue Perkins deserves a place in British Legacy
Sue Perkins deserves a place in British Legacy for the range of work she has contributed to British broadcasting and for the consistency with which she has crossed its formats. Her partnership with Mel Giedroyc began in the Cambridge Footlights and developed into Channel 4 presenting, a long run on The Great British Bake Off, and later television and podcast projects. On Bake Off, Perkins helped front a programme that made baking the subject of a major BBC competition series; when the show changed broadcaster, she and Giedroyc chose not to continue. That is a concrete chapter in the history of a prominent British television format, rather than a claim that one presenter alone created its success.
Her contribution is not confined to one programme. The Supersizers’ historical food experiments brought a factual and comic approach to different periods of British life, while Heading Out showed her writing and acting in a sitcom of her own. Her work on Radio 4, culminating in becoming the permanent host of Just a Minute, connects her to a long-running tradition of British spoken-word entertainment. Travel documentaries, conducting programmes, memoirs and panel appearances reveal a performer willing to take on very different kinds of work. Together, these achievements make Perkins a notable figure in modern British media: a comedian and presenter whose career has linked popular entertainment with factual storytelling, writing and radio.
Sources
Adapted in part from Sue Perkins by Wikipedia contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0. Text has been edited and combined with the existing article; this adapted text is shared under the same licence. Contributor history.
