Gordon Ramsay was offered the 'Bake Off' job but didn't want to be Mary Berry's "sloppy seconds"

“Mary Berry’s sloppy seconds”: good name for a prog rock band, kind of a disgusting sentence otherwise. But that’s how Gordon Ramsay described being offered a job on The Great British Bake Off.

According to Gordon, he was offered a role on GBBO – but turned it down.

“I’m not very good at sloppy seconds,” he told The Telegraph.

“I don’t want to be the male version of Mary Berry. I’m 30 years younger and more wrinkly than her anyway.”

And Gordon has pretty strong feelings about the way Bake Off has been handled.

“I think as with Top Gear, we have an asset that is a crown jewel within a network. 14.5 million viewers: there will never be another cookery show with that number, ever again.”

“For me, Bake Off is like the Queen: it’s something to be respected, listened to and cared for. Not sold off.”

Ramsay also used the interview to talk about his children, who he says get none of the perks of his celebrity.

“They don’t sit with us in first class. They haven’t worked anywhere near hard enough to afford that. At that age, at that size, you’re telling me they need to sit in first class? No, they do not. We’re really strict on that.”

“I turn left with Tana and they turn right and I say to the chief stewardess, ‘Make sure those little fuckers don’t come anywhere near us, I want to sleep on this plane’. I worked my fucking arse off to sit that close to the pilot and you appreciate it more when you’ve grafted for it.”