Sue mixes it up to discover recipe for literary success (From Worcester News)

Sue mixes it up to discover recipe for literary success

3:44pm Tuesday 11th October 2011 in Mike Pryce By Mike Pryce

IT’S been described as “Bridget Jones meets Nigella Lawson”, which ought to please at least one colleague on the editorial floor here who is never very far away from an image of the pneumatic domestic goddess.

But the debut book from Sue Watson, Fat Girls and Fairy Cakes, has a much stronger bloodline than that to this newspaper.

Because Sue is the wife of Nick Watson, who served a stint as news editor on the then Worcester Evening News in the 1990s and was a Whirling Dervish of an opening bowler for our office cricket team – rather grandly titled Lord Onlooker’s Gentlemen’s Invitation XI.

In fact, “invitation” had little to do with it and may have given the impression we were picky. Not true. We were consistently short of numbers and Sue is probably blissfully unaware how close she came to being asked to field at long stop.

Whether she was a second Rachael Heyhoe-Flint in waiting, we will never know. But what is evident is that she is a very promising author.

Which hasn’t happened by accident, for the Watsons’s is a modern media marriage.

Both cut their journalistic teeth in the world of the written word before moving on to television. In other words, Sue has strung sentences together for a living before now.

She was born in Manchester and studied English at the local polytechnic before gaining her journalism qualifications and moving to London, where she worked on nationals and magazines.

Then she came up to Worcester, married Nick and spent time on both our weekly Berrow’s Worcester Journal and the Worcester Evening News. Next stop was the BBC in Birmingham – where Nick still works – and an initial job as a researcher at Pebble Mill on Good Morning with Anne and Nick. Not Watson, but Owen.

“I worked on many different programmes while at the BBC,”

said Sue, “and I also enjoyed two years as Terry Wogan’s producer on Points of View, which was an experience.

“I’ve worked on cookery programmes with James Martin, Ainsley Harriott and Sophie Grigson, hospital wards, daytime sofas and garden makeovers. This has given me a profound and deeply shallow knowledge of lifesaving, cake-making and bulbplanting.

“In my early years in Worcester we lived in Byfield Rise, near the old Beehive pub, but when I joined the BBC we moved to Sandys Road in Barbourne.

“When our daughter Eve was born in 1999 she attended the BBC crèche, but the car journey into and out of Birmingham every day was tough for a small child so we decided to leave Worcester in about 2002 to live in Bromsgrove, which is where we still are.”

In 2005, Eve suffered a severe virus and was hospitalised.

Although she recovered completely, it did make her mother question what she was doing with her life.

Sue said: “Television is a great career, but it involves long hours away from home and the programmes I was working on meant I would be away for days on end. I really missed Eve and didn’t want one day to regret a life of work where I’d missed my child growing up, so decided I wanted to do something that would fit in with our lives.

“I was a trained journalist and was used to writing TV scripts, but had always wanted to write fiction, which is quite different.

“Around this time I recall a conversation I had with a colleague at work who said she didn’t want to be in TV anymore, she just wanted to stay at home, look after her children and bake cakes.

“I liked the sound of this and the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to do it and write about it.”

Sue has been interested in cooking, especially baking, for quite a while. “I used to go to cookery classes with my mum when I was young and really enjoyed them,” she said.

“Then James Martin taught me a lot when I was working as a producer for his TV shows. But Nick and I were so busy, home baking was a real luxury.

“I’d leave for work at 7am and not get back until 8pm. You felt as though you really hadn’t got your own life.”

That’s when the decision came to get off the treadmill, chill a bit and write her first novel.

The advice to new authors is to write about what you know and Sue’s TV experience provides the inspiration behind Fat Girls and Fairy Cakes, which follows the personal and professional trials and tribulations, triumphs and disasters of TV exec Stella Weston, who is married to a TV cameraman.

“The novel is pure fiction, but there are elements of the heroine’s work that mirror some of my own experiences and I think the work/life/weight balance is something most women can relate to,” she said.

Certainly it has received, as they say, critical acclaim, being called “a sensational debut novel,” “full of spirit, heart and girl power” and “a riotous, razor-sharp and heartwarming story of one woman’s struggle to follow her dream”.

On top of all that, it contains some delicious, original cake recipes.

Sue Watson really would have been wasted fielding on the boundary for Lord Onlooker’s.

Cricket tea, anyone?

􀁥 Fat Girls and Fairy Cakes by Sue Watson (Rickshaw Publishing £7.99) is available in paperback and Kindle from Amazon. The author is holding a book signing at Waterstones, Worcester, on Saturday, October 22, from 11am until 3pm, when she will be giving away free cake recipes too...