'Tough, really? I judge muffins'
Paul Hollywood swaps the Bake Off tent for the open roads of Europe in his new series, Continental Road Trip. The baker and presenter tells Susan Griffin viewers will get to see a whole new side of him.
HE MIGHT be known for his bread and buns but away from the oven, Paul Hollywood is a petrol-head and loves nothing more than racing cars.
'Baking is my career, it's what I am. The whole presenter thing is an accident. I'm a baker by trade but my hobby was always cars,' says The Great British Bake Off judge.
He's been passionate about motors 'for as long as I can remember'.
'My dad used to have several cars growing up – nothing particularly special, but I just loved cars,' says Hollywood, who shared his enthusiasm for motors on BBC programmes Racing Legends and Licence To Thrill: Paul Hollywood Meets Aston Martin, in 2015.
The same year he represented the racing team Beechdean Aston Martin in the British GT Championship.
'When I was about 13, I fell in love with the TR7. Don't ask me why, I just did. It was this chocolate one with chequered seats in a garage down the road from where we grew up in the Wirral,' he recalls in his familiar Liverpool twang.
'I used to go and watch this car every night and go and look at it because I just loved it.'
No wonder he describes his latest show, Paul Hollywood's Big Continental Road Trip, as 'a dream job for me'.
In the three-part series, Hollywood travels to Germany, France and Italy, endeavouring to understand more about each country through its love of cars.
'It didn't feel like work,' he says. 'The travel was just amazing – we went to some really beautiful places. I thought, "This is magic, it really is magic".'
