Intrepid traveller Sue Perkins says she doesn’t have a lot of boundaries. So what better place to visit than America’s biggest state, Alaska?
Sherna Noah - 31 January 2024
It’s rare to hear anyone express thanks for an experience that makes them go grey. But Just a Minute host, comedian and travel presenter Sue Perkins – who, for her latest show, has been learning how to protect herself from bears in the Alaskan wilderness – is full of gratitude. “Travel has made me much more grey,” she says of her string of TV adventures, from training with sumo wrestlers in Japan to tracing the course of India’s Ganges. “In the sense that I don’t rush to a solution with anything. I’m not really a black-and-white person; I need to think about everything and everybody involved.”
Perkins had previously visited Alaska for a 2012 documentary on the world’s most dangerous roads, but in her new series, she takes in the history, wildlife and people of America’s 49th state, its largest and least populous. “You can’t get a grip on it, even when you’re there, because of its scale,” she says. “It’s extraordinary, magnificent.” Misunderstood as a place of “oil refinery workers, guys in checked shirts, dudes and guns,” reckons Perkins, in Alaska you can unplug from today’s “sensory overload”. And you don’t need to be Bear Grylls to experience this “edge of civilisation”. Just don’t expect to bring your way of life there, she suggests. “You have to adapt. It’s big, brash, and beautiful.
And you might see a bear.” Ah, bears. Alaska – bought by the United States for $7.2 million from Russia in 1867 – is home to nearly 140,000 black, brown and polar bears. Perkins learns to protect herself with pepper spray but also serves lunch (5lbs of dog food, 3lbs of oranges, a whole salmon, four eggs and celery smothered with peanut butter) to a bear at a wildlife conservation centre.
“I fell in love,” she says. Alaska’s moose are also a big draw: “They’d be in people’s gardens – you’d be having a cup of tea and suddenly the moose would just potter around. You’re right up against the natural world. There’s still so much wilderness and wildlife.” All those critters – “one bear crossed the road in front of us” – means that guns are a way of life in Alaska.
At a shooting school, a visibly uncomfortable Perkins watches a ten-year-old boy practise with rifles as his proud parents look on: “I had a real revulsion to it,” the former Great British Bake Off host says. “To see kids being so composed in gun-handling was weird. But you find out that it’s about a culture of sustenance, hunting and being able to take care of your family.”
Perkins’s own childhood, in Croydon, was of course very different. Travel involved day trips to Brighton or visits to her grandparents, who moved to a tower block in Spain’s Torremolinos. “It was the road most travelled,” she says, “the same places every year.” In fact it wasn’t until she was 17, on her first solo trip, that she branched out – to New York, where she was promptly mugged. (“It was a very nice, gentlemanly mugging. He said, ‘I’ll take your bags.’ I said, ‘No, I can carry them.’ He went, ‘I’ll take your bags.’ And I went, ‘Oh.’”)
On TV, Perkins appears game for anything – including being shot (while wearing a bulletproof vest) for a Netflix programme in Colombia. “I suppose as I get older, I’m not as fit as I should be; I’m tubbier than I was, so I’m more inclined to limit activities that show that than anything else. But I don’t feel fear about going into situations. I don’t have a lot of boundaries.”
A pilgrimage through the Himalayas for a BBC documentary was a “gear change”, allowing her to “really grieve” following the death of her father from a brain tumour in 2017. “When you go up a mountain… you’re left with this grey, pale landscape. As we came down, suddenly colour gets reintroduced… It was like my life was beginning again.”
Meanwhile, Perkins revealed in 2015 that a non-cancerous tumour was discovered in her pituitary gland while having medical tests for a BBC show. “As long as I remember to take my medication, I’m all right,” she says. “It’s an annoying lump in my head, but… I don’t intend to let it circumscribe my future in any way.”
That future, fans will be pleased to hear, could see her work with comedy partner, former Light Lunch and Bake Off co-host, Mel Giedroyc again. “There’s some chatting,” she says, keeping tight-lipped on those plans. The pair have just spent an evening watching Basil Brush in panto. “We’re proper mates, we weren’t put together by a management team!”
Perkins feels more at ease being herself on screen now. “I’m very curious. I’m a real softy. I cry and laugh a lot. I feel everything,” she says. But despite her success, she will never succumb to one trait perhaps expected of a television presenter: “I have no interest in personal grooming! I don’t care what I look like! I’ve worked with my make-up artist for years, and it’s like a fight, trying to get me in that chair.” SHERNA NOAH
It’s rare to hear anyone express thanks for an experience that makes them go grey. But Just a Minute host, comedian and travel presenter Sue Perkins – who, for her latest show, has been learning how to protect herself from bears in the Alaskan wilderness – is full of gratitude. “Travel has made me much more grey,” she says of her string of TV adventures, from training with sumo wrestlers in Japan to tracing the course of India’s Ganges. “In the sense that I don’t rush to a solution with anything. I’m not really a black-and-white person; I need to think about everything and everybody involved.”
Perkins had previously visited Alaska for a 2012 documentary on the world’s most dangerous roads, but in her new series, she takes in the history, wildlife and people of America’s 49th state, its largest and least populous. “You can’t get a grip on it, even when you’re there, because of its scale,” she says. “It’s extraordinary, magnificent.” Misunderstood as a place of “oil refinery workers, guys in checked shirts, dudes and guns,” reckons Perkins, in Alaska you can unplug from today’s “sensory overload”. And you don’t need to be Bear Grylls to experience this “edge of civilisation”. Just don’t expect to bring your way of life there, she suggests. “You have to adapt. It’s big, brash, and beautiful.
And you might see a bear.” Ah, bears. Alaska – bought by the United States for $7.2 million from Russia in 1867 – is home to nearly 140,000 black, brown and polar bears. Perkins learns to protect herself with pepper spray but also serves lunch (5lbs of dog food, 3lbs of oranges, a whole salmon, four eggs and celery smothered with peanut butter) to a bear at a wildlife conservation centre.
“I fell in love,” she says. Alaska’s moose are also a big draw: “They’d be in people’s gardens – you’d be having a cup of tea and suddenly the moose would just potter around. You’re right up against the natural world. There’s still so much wilderness and wildlife.” All those critters – “one bear crossed the road in front of us” – means that guns are a way of life in Alaska.
At a shooting school, a visibly uncomfortable Perkins watches a ten-year-old boy practise with rifles as his proud parents look on: “I had a real revulsion to it,” the former Great British Bake Off host says. “To see kids being so composed in gun-handling was weird. But you find out that it’s about a culture of sustenance, hunting and being able to take care of your family.”
Perkins’s own childhood, in Croydon, was of course very different. Travel involved day trips to Brighton or visits to her grandparents, who moved to a tower block in Spain’s Torremolinos. “It was the road most travelled,” she says, “the same places every year.” In fact it wasn’t until she was 17, on her first solo trip, that she branched out – to New York, where she was promptly mugged. (“It was a very nice, gentlemanly mugging. He said, ‘I’ll take your bags.’ I said, ‘No, I can carry them.’ He went, ‘I’ll take your bags.’ And I went, ‘Oh.’”)
On TV, Perkins appears game for anything – including being shot (while wearing a bulletproof vest) for a Netflix programme in Colombia. “I suppose as I get older, I’m not as fit as I should be; I’m tubbier than I was, so I’m more inclined to limit activities that show that than anything else. But I don’t feel fear about going into situations. I don’t have a lot of boundaries.”
A pilgrimage through the Himalayas for a BBC documentary was a “gear change”, allowing her to “really grieve” following the death of her father from a brain tumour in 2017. “When you go up a mountain… you’re left with this grey, pale landscape. As we came down, suddenly colour gets reintroduced… It was like my life was beginning again.”
Meanwhile, Perkins revealed in 2015 that a non-cancerous tumour was discovered in her pituitary gland while having medical tests for a BBC show. “As long as I remember to take my medication, I’m all right,” she says. “It’s an annoying lump in my head, but… I don’t intend to let it circumscribe my future in any way.”
That future, fans will be pleased to hear, could see her work with comedy partner, former Light Lunch and Bake Off co-host, Mel Giedroyc again. “There’s some chatting,” she says, keeping tight-lipped on those plans. The pair have just spent an evening watching Basil Brush in panto. “We’re proper mates, we weren’t put together by a management team!”
Perkins feels more at ease being herself on screen now. “I’m very curious. I’m a real softy. I cry and laugh a lot. I feel everything,” she says. But despite her success, she will never succumb to one trait perhaps expected of a television presenter: “I have no interest in personal grooming! I don’t care what I look like! I’ve worked with my make-up artist for years, and it’s like a fight, trying to get me in that chair.” SHERNA NOAH