Instantly recognisable for her bright coloured clothes and sassy specs, Prue Leith may be 85, but she has no plans to grow old gracefully
Prue Leith poses backstage ahead of the Vin & Omi show during London Fashion Week February 2025.(Image: Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images)
Push-ups and pilates are just a few examples of exercise that Prue Leith describes as “variations of hell.”
Now 85, the forthright grande dame of cookery, declares: “I find exercise for the sake of exercise painful and unbelievably boring.
“Being tortured on a Pilates reformer machine, forcing oneself out into the rain to go running or doing push-ups on the bedroom floor are all variations of hell for me. Ditto yoga, steps, spinning and the rest.”
Married to retired clothes designer John Playfair, 77, who she lives with in a house they built together in Moreton-in-Marsh, Gloucestershire, the Great British Bake Off presenter’s revelations come in her new book Being Old…And Learning to Love It, published on February 26.
Prue – known for her bold appearance, with brightly coloured clothes and sassy specs – is not growing old gracefully any time soon.
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Prue Leith is married to retired clothes designer John Playfair, 77, who she lives with in a house they built together in Moreton-in-Marsh, Gloucestershire.(Image: Channel 4)
But, mum to politician son Danny and filmmaker daughter Li-Da, she says her grandchildren can threaten her youthful outlook. She says: ”You know you’re old when your three-year-old grandchild grabs your neck and says, ‘Nana, why is your neck so stringy?’ And you can’t deny the stooping back, greying hair, widening waist and, and, and. But I think old age is largely in the mind.”
Keeping contestants on their toes as a judge on Ch 4’s The Great British Bake Off, she is pleased that attitudes to ageing have changed. She says: “My parents’ generation, and many of mine, imbibed the idea that once we’re past 60, all sorts of things are ‘inappropriate’ for us: dancing, sitting on a bar stool, wearing pillar-box red, smoking weed. They seem to think we should all wear beige, sit in a corner and knit.
“I think they were brainwashed. They got the wrong idea of their worth, concurring with the idea that oldies should be neither seen nor heard, that we should dress as unobtrusively as possible, that we should stop thinking about romance, love and sex, that we are too old to be of any use to anyone, and that we should devote ourselves to good causes and ungrateful grandchildren.”
Prue has no truck with the ‘MEDS’ mantra for the elderly, in which M is for Mindset and having a positive attitude; E is for exercise, which you need every day; D is for diet, eating in moderation and eschewing alcohol and S is for stress, which should be avoided. “Needless to say, I don’t match up,” she says. “I’m lucky in that I positively relish a bit of stress: I like having lots of balls in the air and a full diary, and I enjoy sorting muddles and fixing things. But I seldom feel stressed.”
Prue Leith and her husband John Playfair at Wimbledon last year (2025).(Image: Getty Images for Pimm’s)
What she describes as “forced exercise” is something Prue finds particularly tough. She says: “At various times in my life, I’ve joined gyms that I never went to. I’ve hired personal trainers and soon unhired them, and made countless resolutions about exercise and diet that I’ve never stuck to. The worst kind of exercise is when it’s non-competitive, like Pilates or yoga or going to the gym.”
And she says she’s not exercise-shy, she just prefers sporty pastimes. Prue says: “I love tennis because it’s sociable and there’s a chance you’ll win. I love riding because it’s exhilarating, and you can do it in a gang. I used to exercise polo ponies on Ham Common in London with a dozen or so other amateur riders, and there is intense pleasure in cantering in a companiable group in the early mornings with the mist just dispersing, as you watch deer and scattering rabbits. I also used to play tennis every Tuesday morning. Weekends at home in the country offered long walks, and more tennis and riding.”
Ageing has, sadly, curtailed some of these hobbies. “As l’ve got older, I’ve reluctantly adapted,” she says. “I stopped riding when my daughter left home and sold her horse, and I found myself hacking about the countryside on my tod. I realised that if I was lying in a ditch with a broken back, my horse would just crop the grass and wait for me to get on again.
“He wouldn’t, like my childhood pony, Laddie, run home to fetch help. I stopped playing tennis when I kept falling over; likewise, I now fish from a boat, not standing in a rushing river; and last Christmas I went sit-skiing, not skiing. All these accommodations have been forced on me, and I’m fine with that: I don’t want to be swept away by the river Spey or to break my neck on an Alpine piste.”
Alison Hammond and Noel Fielding (back row) with judges Paul Hollywood and Prue Leith.(Image: PA)
Put off skiing by two attempts to learn – one, aged 19, and one later in life, she says: “Both times a disaster.” The second time was on nursery slopes with no snow in Wengen, Switzerland. She says: “Utter fiasco. I had long skis which kept coming off, and a 17-year-old Austrian instructor, whose flowing blonde hair and graceful moves disguised the hard-faced devil she really was. She swooped down the icy slopes and I came tumbling after. She shouted a lot, I cried a lot.”
But she loves sit-skiing, which she discovered during a no expense spared “magical Christmas week trip to Val d’Isère in 2024 with 17 members of our ‘blended’ tribe.” She says: “I thought, ‘’sod it, let’s go the whole hog’. What better way to spend your hard-earned cash than on a family holiday? But the highlight, for me, was the sit-skiing.”
She also loves travelling around the UK with husband John – often turning work trips to promote her books, or a theatre tour with her stand-up show into a mini-break adventure. She says: “John sweetly comes with me, and that turns a work trip into a jolly jaunt. Even if you are booked in different theatres every night, the towns are so close it’s never more than a few hours’ drive to get to the next one, leaving time to see the town.
“All four of us – me, John, the driver-cum-fixer-cum-techie and Clive Tulloch, producer, director and friend bowl along, listening to music or podcasts, or chatting and doing emails. We arrive in time for a nice lunch, then I’ll have a nap while John goes exploring, and Clive and Jim set up at the theatre. Then we’ll do the show and have a nightcap in our hotel.”
And Prue always follows what seems to be her age-defying mantra, saying: “Nothing in moderation!”
This interview was taken from an extract on Apple Books and Amazon from Being Old…And Learning to Love It, by Prue Leith.
