Bake Off's Prue Leith shares 'appalling' experience on acid and going to an orgy

27 September 2020, 20:57 | Updated: 27 September 2020, 20:59

Great British Bake Off star Prue Leith has revealed in an exclusive LBC interview her "horrific" experience taking LSD in her youth, and the time she stripped her clothes to fit in at an orgy.

The 80-year-old said she has suffered nightmares since dropping acid with her first husband Rayne in the 1960s as she described having "horrific hallucinations" on the trip itself.

Speaking to LBC host Ruth Davidson as part of her new show An Inconvenient Ruth - broadcast on Sunday at 9pm - Leith said: "It was the most appalling experience I've ever had.

"I had absolute horrific hallucinations. I couldn’t look at [Rayne] because he turned into a kind of monster, and my arms, the flesh dripped off them, I just, there was just bones left.

"Just shows what an extraordinary imagination I must have."

Leith then described having nightmares up until her sixties where she would wake up and "nothing would look like I knew it ought to look" as it would be "wobbly or strange or growing and sinking and shrinking and expanding".

She said: "I would still sometimes wake up in the night and I felt I could see the air, you know, it was almost, patterned like, little squares or pixels. Anyway, that certainly taught me a lesson."

The Bake Off judge can currently be seen on the latest series of the Channel 4 series, in which she has starred since taking over from Mary Berry in 2017.

Alongside fellow judge Paul Hollywood and presenters Noel Fielding and Matt Lucas, this series was filmed with careful planning inside a biosecure bubble to shield from the pandemic.

But referring back to her carefree youth decades prior to coronavirus restrictions, Leith then recalled the time she was taken to an orgy just outside of Paris.

She told Davidson her banker friend had invited her to a party which she thought was "a bit odd" when they were interrogated at the door, later to find what kind of party they had actually arrived at.

She said: "My banker friend, I have to say, thought this was terrific and he disappeared immediately.

"Now, I’d come with him, I had no idea where I was, I didn’t have any money or any way to get away and he had vanished.

"And he presumably thought I was having a great time somewhere else.

"I started off trying to keep my clothes on and having a drink at the bar and everybody just kept saying to me: 'Why have you got your clothes on?' you know, 'Come on, you English woman, you’re feeble, you’re so buttoned up, take your clothes off.'

"So I realised I would be less conspicuous if I took my clothes off, so I did.

"I tell you what, I did walk around, I’d pretend I was going to the loo and then I’d pretend I was going to the bar and I did this for an hour or two and then my friend reappeared and we went home.

"And that was it, so my orgy was not nearly as exciting as you’d like it to sound."

:: Listen to the rest of the interview tonight at 9pm on LBC or as a podcast on Global Player, where Leith also discusses her thoughts on assisted dying and opens up about her marriage to her mother's best friend's husband.

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