In an exclusive interview with E! News, Great British Baking Show judge Prue Leith explained how she and fellow judge Paul Hollywood ultimately make their decisions on the show.
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The judging process on The Great British Baking Show is as precise as the finest French pastry.
Prue Leith, who acts as a judge on the beloved baking competition series alongside Paul Hollywood, explained that the process for judging the amateur bakers inside the tent is actually a lot more detailed than it appears on TV.
“You don’t see this, but we actually score everybody, which is helpful to us,” Prue exclusively told E! News. “If we get to the stage, and we often do, where it seems to all come down to the Showstopper and there’s a disagreement where I think somebody is slightly better than the other, we’ll go back and look at how they did the day before.”
When it comes to the Signature Challenges—in which the bakers execute practiced, classic recipes with their personal spins—Prue explained that she and Paul “score it one to 10,” but they “just don’t tell the bakers about it.”
If Prue and Paul are really struggling to come to a definitive conclusion, they’ll widen their lenses even further.
“If we’re still stuck and we’re still genuinely unable to choose somebody and we think, ‘This is crazy, these two people are absolutely equal,'” she explained, “we will go back and look at how they’ve done up until then in the competition, which we normally don’t do.”
Prue continued, “Normally, we try and judge each episode. Everybody starts on a level playing field. It doesn’t matter how badly you did the week before. It doesn’t matter how well you did the week before. It doesn’t count, except for when the judges are completely stuck.”
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In making their critiques, Prue admitted that she and Paul often come at things from their own unique perspectives.
“Paul is such a good baker,” she said. “He is really concerned about the technique—how light the cake is, how well whipped the icing is—he’s very hot on the technique. I’m rather a tastebuds judge. If it tastes fantastic, I’m happy.”
Despite their differences, however, Prue said she and Paul have “never come to blows yet” and their judging is always in sync.
“When we come to putting a number down, we are never, ever more than one mark away from each other, always in the same order,” she said. “We don’t confer about the numbers. We do them separately and then we look at them.”
Find out how Prue and Paul make the season’s biggest decision of all when the season finale of The Great British Baking Show drops Nov. 18 on Netflix.
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