Well, at least she’s honest.
The Great British Baking Show judge Prue Leith is admitting to Modern Family star Jesse Tyler Ferguson that she had no idea who he was when he competed on a celebrity edition of the Stateside spinoff The Great American Baking Show.
Leith dropped the truth bomb when she appeared on Ferguson’s Dinner’s on Me podcast and the actor asked if she felt she had “big shoes to fill” when she replaced Mary Berry as judge on GBBS in 2017.
“Do you know, I didn’t, simply because I had never watched Bake Off,” she said, referring to the show by its U.K. title, The Great British Bake Off. “I hadn’t. I watched really very little telly anyway.”
“Did you know I was on Modern Family?” Ferguson followed up.
“No,” she replied, drawing a gasp.
“I love that,” Ferguson said. “Do you know any of the people that come on the show? You’re like, ‘I don’t know. They’re famous in America?'”
“No, I don’t know anyone who comes on the show,” Leith fessed up. “It’s too embarrassing. I have to have a little crib sheet and mug you all up before.”
Ferguson then imagined Leith looking at a cheat sheet with his name on it and saying, “I don’t know what Modern Family is,” which prompted Leith to laugh and admit she’d “never heard of it.” But in her defense, she explained, “I don’t watch very much British television, never mind America.”
Ferguson, of course, played high-strung attorney Mitchell Pritchett for 11 seasons of Modern Family, from 2009 to 2020. On the recent “Celebrity Summer” special of The Great American Baking Show, he competed against fellow stars Yara Shahidi, June Diane Raphael, and Andrew Rannells, with Leith and Paul Hollywood judging and Zach Cherry and Casey Wilson hosting.
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Being on the special was “a baker’s dream,” according to Ferguson, who gushed to Leith of the experience, “It was just the best time. I honestly felt like I was in a dream. Because I’ve watched the show so many times where you sit on the floor and watch your bake and like, you know, I was doing all those things and it was a proofing drawer, which I never had to use. It’s also for someone like me who loves to be in the kitchen, it’s such a cook’s dream, or baker’s dream, because you have everything you could possibly want.”
To which Leith joked, “Including somebody else to wash up.”
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Elsewhere on the podcast, over a dinner of escargot in London, Ferguson and Leith talked about her incredible life before TV: growing up during apartheid in South Africa; falling in love with her mother’s best friend’s husband; and becoming a celebrated chef, novelist, and memoirist. Plus, she shared how it feels to be thriving in her 80s, and the lemon curd cupcake she still remembers from Ferguson’s time in the baking tent.
Listen to Leith’s full appearance on Dinner’s on Me above.
