Sue Perkins

She studied English at Cambridge, graduating in 1991. While at Cambridge, she was a member of Footlights (where she was president during the academic year 1990–91) along with Mel Giedroyc, her frequent on-screen presenting partner. Sue Perkins is now a television and radio presenter of shows from light entertainment to documentaries on art, to popular fiction and history. With a background in stand-up comedy, her multi-genre filming projects have taken her all over the world and across all walks of life and experience. She became a popular household name when co-presenting the first seven series of the hugely successful BBC programme The Great British Bake Off. Following her success in Maestro, a television programme where she was taught the art of conducting an orchestra with the BBC Concert Orchestra, Perkins went on to guest-conduct the London Lesbian/Gay Symphony Orchestra, the Dinnington Colliery Band and the Grimethorpe Colliery Band. Perkins again conducted the BBC Concert Orchestra at the first Comedy Prom at the Royal Albert Hall in 2011 and is now an associate conductor for the Orion Orchestra. She is also an actress and plays one of the lead roles in the Sky comedy series Hitmen. Perkins’s memoir, Spectacles, was published in 2015 and in 2018 she released an autobiographical travel book, East of Croydon: Blunderings Through India and South East Asia, which was shortlisted in the ‘Autobiography of the Year’ category at the 2018 National Book Awards.