John Whaite looks back: ‘I just wanted to be a fairy. I still do’

Born in 1989, the chef and TV presenter John Whaite grew up in Eccleston, a village in Lancashire. A high-achieving child and teen, he studied at Oxford and Manchester universities and briefly trained as a banker. He turned his attention to TV in 2012, winning The Great British Bake Off. In 2021, he was a finalist on Strictly Come Dancing in the first all-male couple with Johannes Radebe. Whaite, who lives with his partner, Paul Atkins, is now a TV presenter with five acclaimed cookbooks. His memoir, Dancing on Eggshells, is out now.

I was two and a half and sitting on hay bales at my grandad’s farm in this photo. That is where I and my two sisters and cousin would play most weekends. It’s also where we’d do naughty things like wee in Grandad’s wellies. We were quite mischievous.

The teddy is a prop: my dad was an amateur photographer, so he’d set up these lovely shoots every now and again. I’m wearing a Jungle Book T-shirt, not because I liked the film, but because I was obsessed with Sleeping Beauty, and it would have been too far of a stretch in the early 90s to put a boy in that type of T-shirt. I just wanted to be a fairy. I still do!

I had a unique childhood. We lived in a small, working-class estate until I was seven, and my parents would really go to town with decorations at Halloween and Christmas. My dad, who did am-dram and was extravagant and fun, used to knock on the front door dressed as a fortune teller and give us chocolate oranges.

My parents had several jobs: with three children to bring up and a mortgage to pay, they worked their arses off to survive. If I wasn’t serving people in their chip shop, I’d be in the van with my dad dropping things off for his courier service late into the night. He was also a musician, so I’d be his little roadie. It was an exciting, varied life, and no two days were the same.

School was a bit more complicated. One of my early memories is standing up at nursery, silencing the other kids and asking to sing Little Bo Peep on my own. I wanted to perform from a young age and was very confident. But when my parents divorced, it disrupted things. My sisters and I moved from the estate to my stepdad’s farm, where the community had a more middle-class outlook. It was geographically isolating and I felt like an outcast. I was coming to terms with my sexuality, too. While I celebrated being different and relished becoming the class clown – I was so dramatic, daft and silly – I was also bullied. It was a contradictory period.

I used to cringe when I remembered my teenage years, but now I have a sense of pride because I was clearly trying to find my people. I shaved one side of my head in a checkerboard pattern, bleached black and white, and down the middle I had a blue streak. It was horrific. I also went through a mosher phase, wearing a Slipknot hoodie even though I hated the band, and covered my nails with a black Sharpie pen. Angelina Jolie was my role model. I liked how she was fierce and obsessed with death; very morbid like I was. She was a rebel and broke the mould – a lot of people gave her flak and thought she was weird. I identified with that. So much so that I have a tattoo on my crotch like she has. I am so ashamed of it, as I am of all nine of my tattoos. I got them when I was young: my first on a school trip to Germany when I was 13, and the last when I was 18.

Body dysmorphia has been present in my life as far back as I can remember. I always felt chubby and was conscious of being a chunk. At college I was undoubtedly anorexic. I would look in the mirror and hate everything I saw reflected back. Around this time, I also dabbled with making myself sick, but it wasn’t as frequent as it would become later, especially while I was on Bake Off. I liken bulimia to a shark attack, but you are the shark: your eyes glaze over, your pupils dilate and you slip into this horrible trance. Even if you can rationalise and say “Stop”, something within you, something visceral and deep, pushes that intellect away and triumphs, and that is quite scary.

I think I will always be bulimic, but the incredible thing is that since I started ADHD medication earlier this year I haven’t had one binge. My ADHD diagnosis has had such a positive impact on me. And it is fascinating to learn how inextricably linked neurodivergence is with drink and drug abuse, and eating disorders.

There was no trepidation when I signed up to be on Bake Off. I probably should have been more cautious, because back then I didn’t have the tools that I do now to cope with life – sobriety, medication, yoga and meditation. Maybe it was my undiagnosed ADHD allowing me to juggle so much, but I was studying for a law degree at the same time as recording the show, while also going out on the piss at the weekends, and making myself sick, too. The burnout after I finished Bake Off was huge. I was wiped out for two weeks. My sister said I was so grey I looked like a zombie. These days I second-guess every decision I make to ensure that I won’t burn out again. I have to check: is this urge to say yes because of my ADHD; or is it validity-seeking; or for a dopamine rush?

My decision to do Strictly with Johannes felt different; it wasn’t for affirmation, it was about the LGBTQ+ community in general. Gay stories in the 90s were always salacious and the TV was turned off as soon as they came on in our house. It would have been a real tonic and remedy for me to have seen two men dancing on prime-time television and for it not to have been scandalous. The pressure on Strictly was hard at times, but the impact it had was a beautiful thing. In Asda in Wigan, for example, a burly bloke came up to me near the cottage cheese, saying: “Thank you for what you did – my son came out as gay last week because he knew it was OK.”

The Strictly experience was the start of an incredible two years of pulling myself out of the darkness. Alcoholism, drugs, ADHD, depression – I managed to extract myself from those places and situations with nothing but the love of friends and good relationships.

Now I look in the mirror and I am starting to learn to like what I see. Which, for 34 years, has been a difficult thing to do. I still wonder if this is the right industry for me, but it helps that I now live back in the countryside, in Parbold, Lancashire. It’s like a sanctuary.

Whenever I go through a down period, I always crave the wilderness, the peace and predictability of nature. It reminds me of my childhood: if you live on a farm you have no choice but to carry on. Even if you’re ill, you’ve got to get up and feed the cows. You have to crack on because nature demands it. There’s something beautiful and secure in that perseverance. It’s a metaphor I always carry with me.