Paul Hollywood on Bake Off backlash: "all the guns were pointed at me"

“I didn’t want to lose my job. I love doing what I do,” he explained on The Jonathan Ross show. “At the end of the day, I’m a baker by trade, that’s all I am and I want to carry on doing my job and I didn’t think that was a bad thing to do.”

He also reassured sceptics that when the show launches on Channel 4, “the Bake Off won’t change in the sense that the format will stay exactly the same, the tent will stay the same, the challenges and really the bakers [will not change]”.

What will change is Hollywood’s co-judge and Bake Off’s presenters, after Mary Berry, Mel Giedroyc and Sue Perkins left the show. Their replacements are yet to be announced, although there are “a few names in the hat”.

Hollywood also wanted to set the record straight and tell people that he has not fallen out with Mary Berry: “She will always be my TV mother as well as Mel and Sue will be my sisters, we are like a dysfunctional family.”

Love Productions has already started its search for contestants for the next series of the baking contest.