Since parting ways with the Great British Bake Off in 2020, Sandi Toksvig has made no secret of the fact that the gig wasn’t exactly the most mentally challenging of her career.
And in a new interview with the Telegraph, she opened up about exactly what led to her taking on the job in the first place.
“I had a large tax bill. I paid that and then left,” she shared.
Sandi added: “I don’t regret doing it, of course not. But I don’t, hopefully, ever have to do it again. I think it’s OK to say that and not diss the programme.”
Back in January, Sandi shared that she’d made the decision to leave Bake Off as she’d “stopped having fun”.
“I was literally standing there watching meringues dry and thinking, ‘Oh my God, my brain is atrophying’,” she claimed. “So after three years, I thought, ‘That’ll do, go and do something else!’.”
She added: “I’m in love enough with the business to think, ‘OK, that’s a nice pay cheque, but it doesn’t work for me. I’ll move on and do something else’.”
Interestingly, during an interview on the Stirring It Up podcast shared over the summer, Sandi insisted that she didn’t do Bake Off “she “didn’t go into” Bake Off “for the money”, despite it being the “biggest paycheck of my life”.
Of her Bake Off departure, she continued: “I was just getting depressed, and it’s about integrity. If you have that, then you can sleep.
“If you have integrity and you think ‘I’m doing a good thing, I’m doing a good thing for other people, I’m being good to my friends, my family’, then that’s fine. There’s no money in the world that can then take that from you.”
When Sandi made the decision to step down from Bake Off, her co-host Noel Fielding stayed put, initially co-presenting with Matt Lucas before being joined by his current right-hand woman, Alison Hammond.
He’s now Bake Off’s longest-serving presenter, taking over this title from OG hosts Mel and Sue.
The Great British Bake Off continues on Tuesday night at 8pm on Channel 4.