Mel Giedroyc claims close friend Sue Perkins was 'touched up' by ventriloquist Keith Harris' puppet Orville The Duck during 90s TV show

Daily Mail​

23-07-2025

Mel Giedroyc has claimed that pal Sue Perkins was groped by the late ventriloquist Keith Harris' puppet Orville The Duck during filming for a TV in the 90s.
Sue's best friend and presenting partner Mel has has said that Keith used the famous green bird to get handsy with the now 55-year-old Light Lunch presenter.
Sue and Mel were co-hosting the Channel 4 chat show when the incident occurred in 1997 after the children's entertainer was invited on with his giant green puppet.
Keith, who died in 2015 at the age of 67, had his own BBC series in the 1980s and appeared on countless other shows with the green puppet, who wore a nappy and spoke in a falsetto Lancastrian accent.
Speaking on the Parenting Hell podcast, Mel said: 'It was the 90s, there was a lot going down.
'The most memorable of all of the lunches…. we had three puppeteers with their puppets for lunch, so it was like having six guests round the table.
Mel Giedroyc has claimed that pal Sue Perkins was groped by the late ventriloquist Keith Harris' puppet Orville The Duck during filming for a TV in the 90s (Seen on Light Lunch in 1997)
'We had Keith Harris and Orville who got a bit naughty with Sue, Orville did, yes. Harris via Orville got a bit naughty Nineties.'
Fronting the podcast, comedian Rob Beckett said: 'Of course you forget there's a hand in there,' to which Mel said: 'There's a ruddy hand.'
Co-host Josh Widdicombe pointed out: 'They'd get away with it by claiming it was a grey area', and Mel replied 'Exactly'.
Rob added: 'It is not a grey area. It's a hand in a beak. Get off my t**!'
She also revealed how Keith, who died in 2015 aged 67, and the two fellow guests, Roger de Courcey with Nookie Bear and Matthew Corbett with Sooty, all seemed captivated by Sue, who was just 27 at the time.
Mel continued: 'Then we had Roger de Courcey with Nookie Bear who used to work a bit of blue material - they were a little bit late night - and we had Matthew Corbett plus Sooty.
'I had a strong sensation that Roger de Courcey didn't like Matthew Corbett very much because he felt that Corbett's puppeteering was not the full deck.
'So there was real animosity round the table. There was a frosty bloody atmosphere round the table. Harris is in the middle of it all over Perks's grill.'
She added: 'She was the honey trap, I was just the fly kind of buzzing round the edge rather desperately. They bloomin' loved Perks, all of them.'
After the show ended in 1999, Mel and Sue went on to host Great British Bake Off for seven years, when it was one of Britain's biggest TV shows. But she insisted they also had happy memories of doing Light Lunch.
Mel confirmed she snogged the runner on the programme, a then unknown Dermot O'Leary in one of his first TV jobs.
She added: 'There was a lot going down - it should have been called Heavy Lunch.'
It comes after Sue made a very x-rated confession as she recalled attending the birthday party of a spiritual friend of hers.
The broadcaster was speaking to Nick Grimshaw and Angela Hartnett on Thursday's Dish from Waitrose podcast when she told the story.
Sue said she had been invited over to her friend's house and she had organised for an American Shaman to join them to 'perform a ritual'.
The former Bake Off host said the group got into the hot tub at four in the morning... before revealing she had an alcohol enema.
'It was raspberry vodka, that's all we'd got left, we'd drunk everything else,' she said. 'Where he would blow it, a high strength blow into our, into our, into our a***holes.'
She added: 'So, me and my, me and partner stood up, and he was just, he'd drink and then go, pfff, and you just felt this electrifying, electrifying-electrifying burn in your ring piece.'
Recalling the day, Sue said: 'I went to a friend's birthday in the middle of nowhere.
'She's very spiritual and she said, look, I've got John the Shaman here. He's from the States. He will perform a shamanic ritual.
'We were all dressed up. He was dressed up very shamanically, he was wearing a sort of grass skirt and had a long sort of pipe, and, anyway, I just thought the shamanic ritual would come at some point, and it did, it came at four in the morning, when we were in the hot tub.'
Sue added: 'Certainly brought me closer to a sense of myself, if not the universe. And I was thinking, this is weird, but I was, I'm not going to lie, battered.'
She didn't specify which partner she was referring to in the story but she has previously dated TV presenter Anna Richardson, comedian Rhona Cameron, writer Emma Kennedy and artist Kate Williams.