Mel Giedroyc: ‘I’ve never been one of the cool gang. It’s a good feeling’ | Fiction

Mel Giedroyc’s first novel, The Best Things, is published on April Fools’ Day. It was her family that pointed this out. “I’m such a dolt, I hadn’t cottoned on,” she laughs – although, comedian that she is, she thinks the date well chosen. April has always been important to her: it is the month when filming used to start for the BBC’s The Great British Bake Off, which she co-presented with her chum Sue Perkins (“Perks”), along with their other greatest hits such as Mel & Sue and Light Lunch. While she has no regrets about the decision to leave Bake Off, she will admit to “a pang” every spring: “As soon as the daffodils are out, especially on cold mornings when you’re hit by a nice patch of sun, I think of Mary, the tent, the excitement of meeting a new batch of bakers…”

Since Bake Off, Giedroyc has multitasked as a television presenter and today is particularly thrilled by her latest Channel 4 show, Good With Wood (Sundays, 8pm), a competition to find Britain’s best wood-worker. “I’m obsessed. Who knew that woodworking was such a brilliant, life-affirming pastime, with such wonderful people doing it?”

But today, what we’re talking about is the treat she has cooked up on her own: “I got a spurt of midlife confidence and thought: ‘Sod it, I’m over 50 and have always wanted to write a novel, I’m bloody well going to do it.’” She already had some nonfiction (“less scary than fiction”) under her belt, including From Here to Maternity (2005), a comedy diary about pregnancy, concocted while “brain dead”.

It is Giedroyc’s effervescence that explains why her novel is such a pick-me-up to read. It is a riches-to-rags yarn: Sally is married to Frank, who runs a hedge fund management company. They have an oppressively proficient Spanish cook, a spoilt Aussie nanny and a super-competent dog groomer. Sally lives in her house like a guest at a hotel. But when Frank goes bankrupt, there is a dramatic unravelling, and as the kids go into meltdown, Sally begins to find herself – a midlife catharsis. Giedroyc loved every minute of the writing: “Hand on heart, I just want to write another one.”

We rented a 70s flat for nearly two years. We paid the rent in cash to a bloke in a layby up the A1

Trollope furnishes her opening quote: “Rank squanders money; trade makes it; – and then trade purchases rank by re-gilding its splendour.” Money, I suggest to her, is always about more than money. And does she really believe, as her title implies, that the best things in life are free? “It’s an odd time, and we’re struggling as a country. I don’t want people to think I’m saying: ‘Come on chaps, we’ve got nothing and it’s all great.’ But I wrote this in the winter of 2019, pre-corona. And in terms of the book, I’d absolutely say we’re all better off without our trappings.

“Money and status fascinate me,” she continues. “It’s that age-old thing, what you have up front versus what goes on beneath.” Fifteen years ago, Giedroyc had a brush with near bankruptcy herself: “Showbusiness being a fickle mistress (and the fact I had two kids under two) meant my work hit the skids a bit. We’d borrowed a silly amount of money from the bank to buy a house – don’t do it, kids – and ended up not being able to pay the mortgage. We had to sell up very fast. We put all our possessions into storage and rented a 70s flat for nearly two years. We paid the rent in cash to a bloke in a layby up the A1. But the relief of freeing ourselves from that financial millstone was immense. And we were very happy in that tiny rented flat.”

She grew up in the suburbs of Leatherhead and is now proposing to write (she laughs, but is serious) a “Leatherhead trilogy” that “puts Leatherhead on the map”. Growing up, money was never discussed but, “we always knew money was not the thing we should strive for”. Her father, a Polish engineering consultant, “came to this country, in 1947, with nothing. He’d been instilled by his parents to think the most important thing in life was education.” The family went through a patch where money was “light”, during which her mother served Sunday lunches without meat: “Some wise-guy friend of my brother’s piped up: ‘Aren’t we going to get a roast?’ My mother gave him what for…”

Family is hugely important to Giedroyc. She is married to Ben Morris, a television director and drama teacher at Lamda, and they have two daughters, aged 16 and 17. “Ben is the complete anchor of our family. He’s called ‘The Patriarch’ by our daughters. It’s his stalwart mission to keep our household ticking over, while dressed in a shredded tracksuit (thanks to the dog), trainers with myriad holes and his signature flat cap. The man is an utter legend. I feel incredibly thankful to be by his side as we weave our way through the bonkersness of life.” Essential, too, is their beloved family dog: “Juno was rescued from Bulgaria. She was totally feral, off the streets, yet she is such a duchess.”

She admits to infuriating her husband by hanging on to clutter with sentimental value: “During lockdown, I’ve had some pretty good purges. But if somebody I love has hand-made something, as long as it’s not too hideous, it stays. This drives him nuts… he’d like an Ibsenesque interior, with white floorboards, muslin at the windows and no possessions.”

Giedroyc has none of the pretensions of her fictional heroine (or duchess dog). At the outset, Sally seems to be making appearance her life’s work. The best Giedroyc can say about her own behind-the-scenes efforts are “my levels of fake tan have gone up, which is a little bit of a worry,” and “my teeth have been rejigged after the 1970s Leatherhead dental work…” She enjoys “being in a job where my makeup is done for me” but, left to her own devices, lacks the will to dress up. “My summer uniform is shorts, T-shirt, plimsoles. The rest of the year, it’s dungarees.”

She lives in West Ealing “very near Slough”. And she has this theory: “When you grow up in the suburbs, you feel you have to work harder to prove yourself. I’ve never been one of the cool gang. It’s a good feeling.” Another good feeling is being the youngest of four: “I adore my siblings [Miko, a musician, Kasia, a diplomat’s wife, Coky, a TV director]. They’ve looked after me and let me get away with stuff. It’s golden.” From the start, she has been obsessed with comedy. “I applied to Cambridge [she has a degree in modern languages from Trinity College] because of Footlights.”