She’s always given the impression of a rare lack of vanity, of someone who sees her looks as another tool in her clowning toolbox, like juggling balls. And that’s partly true, he says, but only up to a point. “Bespeak [Perkins, her long-term comic partner] And I’ve always said that when the time comes, we’ll do what needs to be done.” We are talking about botox, fillers, things like that. “I’m 54, she’s 52, she’s freaking perfect. I keep saying, ‘Have you been going behind my back?’ We always told each other: if we’re going to do it, we’re going to do it together. And we will go to Armenia to cut off Latvia.” I suggest they sell it in format: Mel and Sue go to Latvia and come back with new teeth and different faces. “Maybe we should switch faces, to confuse people?” she suggests. But back to the point. “I keep thinking, ‘If she goes and does anything without telling me, I’m going to be so cross with her.’ It’s like sending a comedy-mafia signal through the pages of the Guardian: together or not at all, at least in terms of secondary aesthetic treatments. We’re not here to talk about the nearly 35-year-old comedy duo at all, but Unforgivable, Dave’s chaotic panel show that’s just entering its third season. In it, Giedroyc is paired with Lou Sanders (“Twenty years younger. I don’t actually know how old she is, she told me once, but I’m a little deaf”), and they call on a team of three comedians to reveal the worst things they’ve done never. Then some regular people come along and admit to random bad deeds. It’s too scatological, the links are clumsy and the puns are so hard-earned they should be joined together. The new season is so funny that at one point I was howling with laughter at a story comedian Joel Dommett told about his mattress, his bed base and his penis, which even he seemed quite surprised that he was saying. “Who wants to look at cakes?” … Giedroyc with Sue Perkins on The Great British Bake Off in 2013. Photo: Des Willie/BBC/Love Productions “Often, someone will spill something that we didn’t know was going to spill,” he says. “But Joel… he does The Masked Singer, he really is Mr ITV, Saturday night. He is not Mr. One in the morning. That’s kind of the USP of Unforgivable: it takes good, mainstream, even everyday TV people and turns them into Mr or Mrs-One-in-the-Morning. “When you have three people, they start to get competitive with each other,” he says, “and then it’s a lot of fun. Especially with comics. They don’t want to escape. “Unforgiven is a naughty show,” concludes Giedroyc. “It’s just a huge mid-life crisis, basically saying, ‘I want to go back to when I was at my most naughty, which was in the ’90s. I want to be 25 or 23 again.” Actually, I remember it. Although I didn’t know her in the naughty years, I did grunt work for a few years in a row at the Edinburgh venue where she and Perkins perfected their standup routine. They had met in 1988, both at Cambridge, making Footlights, but by that time had left ‘with really weak degrees. Really weak. Low 2:2. Sue too; people assume she must have had a first, but she didn’t. And we weren’t trained to do anything. What are you doing with a degree in French and Italian?’ Mel “didn’t have the guts to go to clown school” (although clowning was her passion) and had tried and failed at drama school, a combination of not properly preparing for the audition and not being pretty enough . She puts it very obliquely, recalling a day at the Bristol Old Vic when “all the other girls had sort of long corkscrew curls, like Helena Bonham Carter. And that’s something that has really changed.” I went around the Perks blunder and said: I can’t do this anymore. We have borrowed from our brothers, our agent lent us a big one Finally, with high failure and failure, he wrote to Perkins, whom he usually calls “Perks,” a letter that Perkins still has. “Basically saying, ‘Dear Susan, would you like to do a double act?’ So that’s what we did for seven years.” He describes their hit as completely shambolic material that they were practically writing as they performed it, often to an audience. Didn’t it look like that from the outside? they seemed almost unique because they could draw a crowd and had an air of seriousness about them, like they made a living out of it. They were the kind of people other artists pointed out, like: “There’s Mel and Sue – Mel smiled at me the other day.” He puts any success down to chance, luck and a reporter “who wanted to do a piece on a really, really difficult double act on the sidelines. Then all of a sudden, we had sold-out shows because all these Times readers showed up.” Mel and Sue when presenting ITV’s Casting Couch in 1999. Photo: ITV/Shutterstock Beneath this haze of self-deprecation, there is a through-line of an absolutely steely determination to be up there on stage, performing. As a child, growing up in Leatherhead with a Polish father and an English mother (her dad was an engineer and, for his second act, a Latvian medievalist), her role model was to try for the school play, not a part, ‘and I’d say : ‘Maybe I could write a little foreword?’ And I would write something really long and end up in a really long part. Such a show.” That squeak, which Perkins also reportedly has in spades, didn’t exactly put them on the fast track. By 1997, after years of standup, making money cleaning, working the bar at Jongleurs (at the time, an incredibly original and vibey comedy club), Giedroyc was defeated. “I remember it so clearly, going around the Perks blunderbuss, sitting up in bed and just saying, ‘I can’t do this anymore. I have no money. You are the same. We have debts, we have borrowed from our brothers, our agent had to lend us a large sum.’ I was desperate.” That’s when the call came for Light Lunch, Channel 4’s wildly funny daytime show full of random interviews and sandwich reviews and, as a harbinger of things to come, cake, which they initially flatly rejected. “We were, like, ‘Excuse me, excuse me, a daytime show? We’re Edinburgh’s top comedians.’” It’s quite unusual come to think of it now, that a major broadcaster would give a weekday hour of television to two unknown comics, and Channel 4 thought so too, starting with the originals. two week contract. But the show soon developed a devoted following, and not in the reckless, post-ironic way that shows like Neighbors and Teletubbies did. “They were students, nursing mothers and prisoners. I received many letters from Gwent’s detention center.’ It’s hard to get to the real center of Mel and Sue as a partnership. There’s definitely something about them, when they come together, that’s more than the sum of their parts: energy, sure, but also hints of surreality and unpredictability. But that career lock didn’t have the effect of making them competitive or resentful, Giedroyc says. “You have to do things, especially as you get older, separately. Otherwise it becomes, I imagine, incredibly claustrophobic. I don’t know how Ant and Dec do it. Total respect, they’re amazing.” Then again, things were different when they started. If acting was sexist in the sense that only beautiful women could do it, comedy was worse: it wasn’t really unusual to read 1,000 words by a man asking, “Why aren’t women funny?” When female comedians were invited to stand-up shows, they were met with a kind of benign but quietly exasperated condescension, like your partner having to bring his wife on a boys’ night out at the pub because there was a mouse in the house. Perks and I always had that safe haven with each other, which I think got us through “Perks and I always had that safe haven between us, which I think got us through,” says Giedroyc, “and I think French and Saunders would say the same thing. It doesn’t matter what the fans outside your shelter say, because you have each other. But I remember doing excruciating stuff in the 90s like Never Mind the Buzzcocks, as it was then [now one of the captains is Daisy May Cooper], and leaving feeling devastated. I was just thinking this was one of the worst things I’ve ever had to go through.” Giedroyc is particularly proud of an episode this season of Unforgivable where all five contestants are women, “they’re all hilarious and I didn’t even plan on it. It almost made me cry.” I wonder if this is the first time this has happened on TV? One of the double breaks was when Giedroyc had children – two daughters, born in 2002 and 2004, with director Ben Morris. Apart from the joys of motherhood and all, this mainly took its toll on the family almost going bankrupt and losing their home, a rich experience she drew on for her first novel, The Finest Things, published last year. When the opportunity to present Bake Off arose in 2010, she was still slim and did it mainly for the money and the chance to work with Perks again. They didn’t immediately fall in love with the idea. “Cake is so backwards, isn’t it?” he says, speculatively. I know what he means. Bake Off has always had a staying heart and an aesthetic license. Filming the first season didn’t exactly satisfy their reservations, although they loved Mary Berry from the start. “I remember phoning Perks and saying, ‘Don’t worry, mate – nobody’s ever…
